After screening a murky, dark and generally crappy presentation of Sherlock Holmes last night, sympathy is in full effect for Danny, a regular reader/commenter here at AATM who recently pointed out the horrible 3D experience he had with Avatar at a Westates theater:

I’ve never had an issue seeing 3D at the theater. [I] saw Up in 3D and A Christmas Carol 3D and both were fine. I got the depth of field and all was nifty. But this…this was bad… Lines meshing through lines, focus slightly off, going crossed eyed when subtitles would pop up on screen. There was zero 3D effect for me.

Apparently, the Westates theater chain told Danny he was crazy. As it turns out, they may simply be unable to correctly operate their own equipment. Westates aren’t the only ones, either. From “Tech guy Al Magliochetti” as noted over at Hollywood Elsewhere, L.A. theaters are half-assed too:

“A 3D frame is made up of two images, a left and a right. Polarizing filters are used on the projector along with convergence lenses to merge both images into one and then filter it so that each of the two images is sent to the appropriate eye and canceled out by the other.”

“The goobs, however, appear to be projecting the film one half frame out of sync, which would normally invert the 3D and make it backwards (background objects appearing closer). And yet to fix that screwup they also inverted the polarizers, meaning that whenever anything is static or slow moving the 3D looks fine, but the minute any fast action occurs the 3D effect collapses and the whole film flattens out until things slow down again.”

“This isn’t something that could be threaded incorrectly so I’m presuming it’s been incorrect since the opening last week, and thereby giving several thousand viewers several thousand headaches.”

That would explain a lot… has anyone else experienced similar problems?