FEATURE: TILED DISPLAYS It’s not just size that’s important
With LCD screens becoming ever larger – not to mention increasingly affordable – the prognosis for what some call videowalls and others call tiled displays (a discussion in itself…) might not appear positive. Ian McMurray finds out why that’s not the case
SBB Serbia, the company's largest cable TV and broadband company, turned to Barco to equip its new network operations centre and master control room
[KEY POINTS]
The terms ‘videowall’ and ‘tiled display’ are, for many – but not all – synonymous
HOW WAS your holiday? Was it nice? Pleasant? Agreeable? Enjoyable? Fine? And that parcel you received? Was it large? Big? Bulky? Sizeable? Substantial? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are some 170,000 distinct words (not including the 47,000 or so obsolete ones) in the English language. As such, it’s no surprise that many of them mean pretty much the same thing. The joy of any language, of course, is its subtlety and nuance. Five words may seem to mean the same – and yet… The term ‘videowall’ has been with us since the 1980s to describe, in effect, a large image delivered via multiple screens. The description ‘tiled display’, however, was coined much more recently to denote – well, a large image delivered via multiple screens. Is one synonymous with the other?
VIDEOWALL, TILED DISPLAY – OR…? “It’s purely a matter of semantics,” claims Guy Van
36 April 2014
Wijmeersch, market director, utilities at Barco. “Google ‘tiled displays’ and you get pictures of videowalls. In my mind, both claim to do the same: providing the user with a larger pixel canvas that is beyond the resolution of a single display or projector and must behave as a single large desktop.”
“It’s just different terminology,” agrees Thomas Walter, product manager – public display solutions, NEC Display Solutions Europe. Videowalls and tiled displays are the same thing. A videowall, regardless of the size of the screens, comprises tiled displays.” “The two descriptions are often used interchangeably in the market, now that most videowalls are made up of displays rather than blended projection systems,” adds Jennifer Davis, vice president of marketing for Planar Systems. Miles Donovan, channel
development manager, business products, EMEA at
‘Cost and
application would be the key determining factors in
deciding whether to use a single
screen or multiple smaller displays’ Joe Graziano, Christie
Christie disagrees. “A videowall would typically be used to display information – video and data,” he says. “It would be laid out in a conventional shape, such as you’d find in a control room. Videowall has become the de factoname for an oversized technology wall.” “Tiled displays, on the other hand,” he continues, “can be any size or shape and are applicable across many more markets.” Both opinions have merit, of course. But they’re far from the only points of view. “A large screen that consists of single displays, a so-called ‘tiled display’, can also be called a videowall. Both terms are applicable,” claims Eric Hénique, director of international sales at eyevis. “But a videowall can also be a big projection surface consisting of one or more projectors using edge blending. This is a videowall – but not a tiled display. A tiled display always consists of single displays.”
The multi-screen display market is growing as potential barriers to adoption are removed
Content, logistics, cost and resolution are key reasons for choosing multi-screen over single screen
Increasingly narrow bezels and in-built intelligence are supporting growth in the market served by videowalls/tiled displays
“But,” he smiles, “if a tiled
display is characterised by visible bezels, where does that leave large images made up of LED panels? They deliver a single, contiguous, seamless image in which there are no visible bezels. Technically, that may be a tiled display – but I’d say it was a videowall.” Whatever it might be, Mike
Tang, marketing manager at Leyard, is enthused by the opportunity. “Bezel-free LED panels are fantastic products for creating large, seamless images,” he says, “and we’re
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