Samsung allies with DreamWorks Animation on 3-D TV

Samsung Electronics is diving headlong into 3-D viewable TVs, launching a number of new 3-D home products today. Samsung also announced an alliance with animated film maker DreamWorks Animation.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, took the stage to tout the alliance and Samsung’s own commitment to 3-D. Tim Baxter, president of Samsung Electronics America, said that Samsung will launch a series of 3-D TVs based on LED, LCD, and plasma technology.

Samsung created the first DLP, rear-projection-based 3-D TV set in 2007. It created a plasma version in 2008, and now believes the time has come to roll it out across a large number of TVs. The company is also rolling out 3-D Blu-ray players, camcorders, glasses and home theater equipment. As with Toshiba, Samsung alsohas a technology to convert 2-D videos to 3-D on the fly, so the content doesn’t have to be natively created in 3-D to be viewed in 3-D. Still, Katzenberg said that DreamWorks was creating a version of Monsters vs. Aliens to run on Samsung TVs.

Katzenberg said that four of the top 10 movies in 2009 were 3-D movies. And only 10 3-D movies were released in 2009. Even more are scheduled for 2010. Monsters vs. Aliens did well, but Avatar is the flagship 3-D movies so far.

One of the new 3-D TVs is as thin as a pencil, or 12 millimeters thick — a third of an inch. That’s only slightly bigger than LG’s 6.9-millimeter TV announced today.

Samsung is also partnering with Technicolor, the pioneer of color TV and an innovator in 3-D TV.