Em uma entrevista com o Deep Space Nine Companion , Gary Hutzel (Supervisor de Efeitos Visuais de Star Trek) DS9) descreveu suas profundas dúvidas com o holo-comunicador. Em suma, era difícil fotografar e iluminar, além de exigir muito mais bloqueio e cenografia do que uma foto em tela normal.
"It was a terrible idea from the get-go. The idea was to create this amazing 3-D image, but TV's a 2-D medium, so it's hard to show that it's 3-D. So you have to move the camera around so that audience can see that it's 3-D, but then it could look to them like the guy beamed in. So you have to find a way to deal with that. It created all these problems that the writers hadn't thought about, and it missed the whole point of why Gene Roddenberry wanted a viewscreen: so you could avoid unnecessary expense."