FEATURE: VIDEOWALLS
The Kentucky Derby Museum features a 4 x 4 videowall built from 16 Planar Clarity Matrix 46in cubes
“for large-scale tenders, the customer will request that the product is delivered with minimal packaging with no manuals or booklets included in order to reduce waste, often paying more per unit upfront to achieve these requirements in order to save the cost of disposal.”
EVOLUTION – OR REVOLUTION?
But, as Eric Hénique, director of marketing and international sales at eyevis, points out, the majority of changes in the videowall market have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary. “There has not been too much new in terms of technology in recent years,” he says. “It’s been more about improvements to existing products, such as the change to LED for cube light sources, smaller rear-
‘Customers have started deploying videowalls in places and in numbers far beyond the traditional videowall market’
Steve Seminario, Planar
26 November 2012
projection devices, narrower bezels, higher resolutions, larger diagonals, more uniform appearance and so on.” He notes the advent of products such as eyevis’s omniSHAPES and squareTILES, although most consider tiled display technology as serving a different market to the videowall market. If there is an exception to the incrementalism that Hénique believes he sees, it’s Prysm’s LPD (Laser Phosphor Display) technology which was launched as recently as January 2010 and which is already making inroads into the videowall market – notably, as the company’s vice president for EMEA, Steve Scorse, claims, with the largest videowall in the US. The installation in question is at IAC’s HQ in New York, and is 120ft wide. But slim, lightweight, seamless displays count for nothing without the ability to drive them – a point well made by Barco’s Peter Bussens, who is market director, control rooms. “The capabilities of a display wall system are mostly determined by the controller infrastructure driving the display and the software that allows interacting with the visualisation system,” he says. “Videowall management software is growing from software intended purely for organising content on a large screen into a fully networked visualisation and collaboration solution.” “Graphics cards are more
powerful and provide higher resolution at higher frame rates over modern, high-rate interfaces such as HDMI and DisplayPort,” adds Arndt Schrader, product manager at RGB Spectrum. “The need for security is increasing, as is the need to display more information in the same space. Lastly, there is also a
need to display more video at higher quality, especially in verticals such as transportation and security. All this leads us to believe that embedded, high- capacity display processors are perfectly positioned.” “What that means is that
control of videowalls is also undergoing a fundamental change,” he continues. “Technology allows a given operator to take on more responsibility while making higher-quality decisions – for example, control a larger geographic area of the power grid or control more computer sources. However, technology is only effective if it doesn’t get in the operator’s way. Consequently, RGB Spectrum developed its MultiPoint Control Room Management System, MCMS, which allows any operator to intuitively control any source and display it anywhere on the system, in a collaborative environment.” For Mitsubishi’s van Dijk, modularity has been an important development: his company’s Seventy Series is specifically designed to make it easier and more cost- effective for integrators to deliver and support display wall systems in a wider number of applications. He also notes that Mitsubishi’s OLED technology has been gaining ground. And while it’s not a technology trend as such, Prysm’s Scorse notes the growing significance of energy efficiency. “A 40sqm videowall such as our installation at Burberry [the retailer’s recently opened London flagship store] would typically consume 30kW of power using LED rear- projection cubes and would need another 10kW of HVAC to provide cooling,” he says. “The Prysm LPD tiles use around 6kW and produce a
COMING SOON TO A HOME NEAR YOU?
Perhaps the most compelling demonstration at this year’s IBC was from payTV software company NDS. The company was showcasing its Surfaces project, which sees two walls of a living room incorporate a seamless videowall – cleverly disguised as wallpaper. Sophisticated control of the
dramatically lower heat output due to the high efficiency of the technology.”
CUBES: NOT DEAD It would be easy, given all the excitement about SNB flatpanel displays and their growing popularity, to believe that the rear-projection cube – for so long the mainstay of the videowall market – is dead. Not so, according to Bussens. “Yes,” he says, “we do see
growing interest for narrow- bezel tiled LCD videowall solutions – including for control rooms. But the control-room market is by far the biggest market for rear- projection-based videowalls and we expect this to stay for years to come – and in control rooms, rear-projection cubes still offer the best solution for 24/7 operation in mission-critical applications,
videowall allows the full wall to be used for showing a movie – but for the TV news, for example, or for widgets, only a small part of the wall is used. The size and placing of the image is proportionate to its context and the degree of ‘immersion’ required by the viewer.
thanks to their robustness, stability over time, redundancy features and the complete absence of any latent images or burn-in.” eyevis’s Hénique sees a
similar picture. “For certain applications cubes are still the first choice for videowall technology,” he says. The almost non-existent bezels, their perfect 24/7 operation without any danger of burn- in, as well as their availability in a wide range of sizes and resolutions make them the ideal solution not only for control rooms, but also for any other application that requires a zero bezel videowall, such as TV newsrooms.”
Scorse is also a believer. “Cubes are having something of a renaissance,” he claims. “Four years ago, when smaller seamed tiled flatpanel displays were introduced,
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