Vizio begins selling 58-inch, ultra-widescreen 3-D TV
Vizio has begun selling its Cinemawide TV, which has an ultra-wide, 58-inch screen that gets rid of black bars when viewers watch movies.
The TV, which went on sale online Wednesday, is built with movies in mind and removes the black bars above and below with its 21:9 aspect ratio to give a more theater-like feel when watching most movies. The super-wide screen has a resolution of 2,560 by 1,080 pixels and is LED.
A Vizio Web page compares an image on the Cinemawide with that of a traditional widescreen.
The Cinemawide also is a 3-D TV and comes with four pairs of 3-D glasses. Irvine-based Vizio says the set provides flicker-free 3-D and a clearer and crisper image that is twice as bright as other 3-D sets.
Officially christened with the tongue-twister name of XVT Series Cinemawide LED Smart TV with Theater 3D, the set is a smart TV and runs Vizio Internet Apps, which include Netflix, Twitter, Facebook, Pandora and others.
The apps come into play when you watch content that doesn’t fill up the screen the way movies will. If you watch a TV show, for example, the content will take up most of the screen but a bar on the left side of the screen running an app will fill the rest.
A Vizio spokesman said that was done because most people Tweet and do other things while they watch TV nowadays and it gets rid of the need for black bars.
As expected, the Cinemawide is no bargain at $2,799, though Vizio is knocking $300 off the price for a limited time. By comparison, you can find traditional widescreen LED TVs with 70-inch screens for less.
This week, Vizio also launched the Co-Star, a competitor to Apple TV that runs on Google TV software. The Co-Star costs $99 and is a box you can use to connect your TV to the Internet and run apps.
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