Input Formats

So it seems pretty safe that the HMZ-T1 will accept stereoscopic content in 720p frame-packed as well as side-by-side and top-bottom format.

Frame-packed 720p at 60 Hz would obviously be the optimum choice as the images for both eyes would each have the full 1280x720 resolution. This should be possible with NVIDIA 3D Vision plus 3DTV Play or ATI's HD3D, in each case via HDMI 1.4 output.

In case this does not work, or for games that do not properly support 3D Vision or HD3D, iZ3D and TriDef drivers should be able to generate side-by-side stereoscopic images in either 720p or 1080p, which would then be displayed in stereo 3D by the HMZ-T1, albeit with a loss of quality as the images for both eyes need to be compressed (quite literally) into a single image of either 1280x720 or 1920x1080.

Battlefield 3
Skyrim
FIFA 12

How bad is the loss of image quality? In order to answer this, I've taken three screenshots from games I'm looking forward to playing with this (namely Battlefield 3, Skyrim and FIFA 12) and simulated the expected quality for native 720p (e.g. framepacking), side-by-side 1080p and side-by-side 720p:

The assumption here is that the HMZ-T1 would accept 1080p input for side-by-side and that the image would be split and then downsampled instead of the other way around, which I'm hoping will be the case.

To be on the safe side, I've downsampled and upsampled again using a bilinear filter, which I guess should be of lower quality than the downsampling algorithm used for side-by-side 3D images and the upsampling algorithm of the HMZ-T1 - keep in mind that the device has an external box for handling these things, so I suppose we can expect a certain degree of quality.

What's my verdict? Unless the optics are truly phenomenal, I very much doubt that the difference between framepacked 720p and side-by-side 1080p would be very noticeable. Apart from text (look at the cockpit display in the Battlefield 3 screenshot, for instance), I would say that since apparently the pixel structure isn't even visible, the difference should be negligible - not for 720p side-by-side content, but for 1080p side-by-side at least.