iZ3D

Priced at $699, iZ3D has accomplished an amazing feat of technological trickery, for lack of a better word, by using two overlaid panels, each providing separate information to one of your eyes when you're wearing 3D glasses. You connect either two DVI ports or the VGA and DVI ports from your graphics card to the display. (It doesn't work from a single output.) Once you've installed the monitor's drivers and its software control panel that lets you adjust the 3D effects, both of the monitor's panels are activated.

3D is subjective to a great extent. From our perspective, iZ3D has gotten it correct within the parameters it defined. You're not in danger of being hit in the head with a twirling yo-yo, but the images do have sufficient depth of field.

To get a feel for gaming, we ran through a few rounds of Company of Heroes and F.E.A.R. the former is not on iZ3D's current list of 74 supported games, while the latter is. (iZ3D is updating drivers to provide more compatibility.)

You turn on the "3D experience" via its software control panel's hotkeys, and then don the 3D glasses. The quick start guide tells you how to use the control panel to adjust the images for the best 3D results.

The problem is that different eyes and games require different degrees of separation (the distance between the foreground and the background) and convergence (the point at which the dual images meet in the foreground.) We needed to tweak the settings for both games to get a high quality 3D image. Despite the images' movement through two LCD panels, frame rates weren't adversely affected. Company of Heroes ran at an average 30.1 frames per second (fps) and F.E.A.R. pushed 122fps. Take the glasses off and you're back to 2D for your more mundane Internet and productivity tasks.