The bad news: For at least the next few years, cable and satellite set-top boxes won't match the full HD resolution to each eye that 3-D Blu-ray discs do(1080p). The good news: This bit of hardware probably doesn't need replacing, just a (typically free) firmware upgrade.

Box makers have for the moment pushed to keep their 3-D and 2-D content the same size image with the same number of frames per second. Inevitably, it's 3-D's resolution that suffers. "Side-by-side 3-D" (which DirectTV uses) squishes the images seen by the left and right eye into a standard high-def frame (makeing the iamge that each eye sees 960 by 1080 instead of the full-HD 1920 by 1080), while "top/bottom 3-D" does the same trick in the vertical dimension. In both cases, the set-top box splits up the image being transmitted and fills the whole of your TV screen with the left eye's image while syncing with the active glasses to darken the right eye, and then  vice versa.