I have no doubt that 3D will be the norm some day, but I don't know when.

And I also have no doubt that a bunch of "traditionalists" will complain about 3D photography, just as they complained about color photography, auto focus, digital photography, and video capture.

Only when a viewing system is developed which doesn't involve coloured glasses, stereo viewers, squinting, or anything which needs an extra stage of effort. Don't forget that stereo photographs have existed from the very early days and were immensely popular in the 19th century. We have since had viewmasters, holograms, stereo cameras, the 3d craze in the 1950's and the current cinema. Oh and those 3d plastic pictures, can't remember what they are called, like the one on the Rolling Stones album "Their Satanic Majesties Request" - I wish I had kept my copy!

They will be the norm on the holodeck.

If 3D movies catch on in a big way, and if people are willing to wear shutter glasses when viewing their monitors, then maybe. However, I doubt it. It's always been a whiz-bang novelty thing, and people get bored of novelties.

Folks seem desperate to buy new electronic gadgets so I think if they put them out there folks will stampede to buy them.

> I have no doubt that 3D will be the norm...

I sure doubt.

As John and Sarah have already said, 3D has a rather long history of failing to catch on. And besides the technical and economic hurdles it faces, it's not clear how 3D can leverage any existing infrastructure. Digital photography, for example, took advantage of widespread PC usage and ownership, and of the Internet and WWW. Hybrid-power automobiles took advantage of the existing system of gas stations (that pure-electric autos can't use). What can 3D photography leverage? Existing printers can't print it. Existing monitors can't display it (vast majority, anyhow). Cell phones can't display it.

Now, one way the status quo might change is that the current interest in 3D movies might hold and build, and reach living rooms via 3D televisions. But I'm not betting on it. Let's instead speculate on how change might be driven from the camera industry.

For a moment, forget about 3D. Consider normal, run-of-the-mill, two-dimensional photography; and specifically, consider the modern digital camera. It's built from three major components: expensive glass, expensive sensors, and cheap computes. Really cheap computes--they're almost free. And they'll be significantly cheaper tomorrow than they are today. If I were a camera engineer looking for the next breakthrough in camera technology, I'd be looking for a way to replace glass and sensors with computes. It's happening now: Canon's S90 doesn't optically correct for barrel distortion, that's corrected in software.

Now what would you like to see in your next camera? Better than Nikon D700 low-light performance with a $200 price tag? You won't get there by pushing D700 technology harder. The lens alone, or the sensor alone, will cost more. Now the big problem with low-light performance is noise, and noise is random. Perhaps you could use two, parallel, sensor and lens combinations. Small, cheap sensors and small, cheap lenses. Both take pictures of the same scene at the same time, recording nearly the same images but with different noise. Use software to extract a good image. I'm sure it's a really tough problem, with the parallax and all, and it may not get solved. But the human brain can do it with two eyes, so it's at least theoretically possible.

If this should happen (and, of course, this is all just speculation), we arrive at a binocular camera system motivated not by 3D but by the economics of 2D photography. And if you've got a binocular camera and sophisticated computation, 3D now comes for free. So you add it. And if everyone has 3D cameras, there's now motivation for companies to pursue 3D display or printing technology.

I was about to close with a comment about traditionalists' true future lament being the unbearable expense of a camera supporting narrow depth-of-field. But then I thought, they'll probably be able to get that with computes.
Maybe I don't doubt.

Not soon, It will depend somewhat on the display technology. When we have 3D TVs in everyone's living room and 3D computer monitors on everyone's desk, then the desire for 3D images will increase and they may well eventually become the norm (at least for P&S cameras).

You can buy 3D P&S cameras today. 3D with a DSLR is going to be tricky unless you use one of those beam splitter mirror systems that were used on film cameras. They were never really popular but they did work on the right lens at the right aperture.

The Sony WX5 does 3D panoramas by alternating left and right eye views while you sweep the camera across a scene and the Fuji Finepix 3D W1 does 3D using two sensors.

You want a prediction. In the form of a ramble, here goes.. As soon as 3-D TVs become common in households. And that will be...not too long, couple years. There will not be a mad dash to buy the cameras until, as someone reasonably mentioned, 3-D TVs become common and the shutter glasses go way down from 150 bucks a pop.
So it will be a niche thing for enthusiasts for a while who have the money for the 50" screen. But it has always been a niche thing since the 1950s when the Realist was used by likes of President Eisenhower, Harold Lloyd and good old Uncle Harry.
Now, we get into popular marketing and discretionary spending in a down economy which I am not so good at eyeballing, but I see some ad money being spent by Panasonic, Sony and Samsung, (The Three Horsemen.)
If a niche represents 10% increase in new shooters(and no we are not thinking zero sum game to a static pie ) I can see it becoming a necessary adjunct to the family snapshooters for sure, for documenting the kids growing up, and part of the wedding portfolio along with the book and the wall prints. Now 3-D can be shared with a crowd in various formats. Even lenticular prints are possible. ( I suspect that if there were a really good way to view family photos in a group it would have hung on. I saw a prototype Canon Canonet stereo which never made it to market. Yet a lot of money was made by the stereo niche of the fifties. The movies, another thing, for another thread and an exhibitor and viewer headache.. technology was not nearly ready.)
Is history a guide. Partly. When color came out, -was it not around 1936 or thereabouts,- it took 15 years to really get a purchase, even in print journalism. Now we look back and think, my gosh, a world without color gravure.
So,yes, I'd cast my vote that we will see a surprising lot of 3-D cameras in a couple years. And some will say that is not photograpy, it is another entity...sort of is... And will come faster than color technology, because color for a long while was expensive, relatively anyway for movies and print journalism. As color did not replace monochrome, 3-D will never supplant or replace flat images. Why should it...
Glasses needed to watch? Not an asset,true. Not a brick wall either. Gamers,think of our young gamers and we got some in the family, they are tuned and enraptured anyway so glasses, hey who gets fussy with glasses if the antagonists are comin' at ya and you can see one behind the bush in 3-D, zap zap.. Not a gamer myself but I know some.. they are market trendsetters and their acceptance will be one to watch :-)
My thought and I expect a minority report:-). However, big factoid. Consumer electronics always needs a new hot thing. PCs are a commodity.The Fuji Real 3-D W-3 sounds like it will be the first launch. If it sells along with the TVs, do we doubt that Panasonic will come out with one. I mean more than the video offering due in October and the 4/3 lens due soon.

I wonder if Sabastio Salgado chimps.