ELO
and our 2GS screens pass the ball-drop test. You can drop a steel ball on to it from height and the screen will not break. Hit it with a beer bottle, and the bottle will break and not the screen. Finally, the gaming world is often in hot, humid
environments. Many of the growth areas in gaming have important street markets, often in bars with high ambient temperatures or high humidity. Because 2GS is just glass, it is basically impervious to humidity.
Since gaming is primarily up to 27”, and people
kind of analogue devices with coatings or transducers on them, this is really a digital grid pattern. Your touch registers on an X/Y grid, which is why there is no need for calibration – the grid is fixed. The mesh is done with tiny wires, you can see them on older versions, but today, Elo mesh PCAP is virtually invisible. It’s all done on a plastic film applied to the back side of a piece of glass. The second kind of plastic PCAP, GFF, is similar to
mesh, but the wires are replaced with metallic printed traces, also invisible to the eye. It’s still essentially plastic layers for X and Y grids glued to the back of glass though. Mesh is typically used in larger sizes, 32” and up, because it’s cost effective; GFF is usually used in smaller portable devices in consumer electronics, because it’s plastic, doesn’t last forever, but it is thin and lightweight, as well as lower cost. Printing on plastic is not ideal in large sizes as plastic is not so stable, it expands and contracts and is subject to humidity, can turn yellow in sunlight, all of these things add up. The third kind of PCAP is called two glass solution [2GS]. It’s a piece of glass glued to another piece of glass; the X/Y traces are printed on the inner sides of the glass so there is no need for plastic; it is two layers of laminated glass and that’s it. This is what we are using in our new monitor line because in our experience, it is the best for a gaming environment and market. To get back to size, we use this technology from 10”
up to 27”, and from 32” and above, for cost reasons, we use the mesh type. GFF we only use in consumer products, we don’t recommend it for gaming. We recommend 2GS because in gaming, you want beautiful graphics. No plastic, just glass gives you the best optics. Full HD, 4K displays, super hi-res – you want a PCAP screen that keeps the image at its best. If you’re paying for a nice monitor you want that image preserved. You will also want something that is anti-vandal
28 APRIL 2016
want great optics of glass, vandal resistance, and operating without any plastic to turn yellow or delaminate in high ambient temperature and humidity over many years — this fits exactly the profile of 2Gs. Most people don’t know all these details yet – it’s up to us to educate them. There are many unnamed PCAP manufacturers that come and go, who do not even put their name on the screen, which are being put into gaming monitors only because of price. Customers have no idea how these will hold up in the field. With Elo, you know where it came from, and we have 1000s of 2GS installations in the field proven over two years already. So there is more to PCAP than just the term PCAP!
CI: Can you curve the 2GS technology as well? MS: For a curved screen, you’d have to use the
mesh solution. Maybe in the future, you could do that but right now, it’s mesh or SAW for curved screens.
CI: How are you able to be competitive in price with 2GS now? MS: It’s several factors. We are providing a solution – we are unique in that we build the entire solution. We make the PCAP chip, the touchscreens, we make and design the monitors, we build them ourselves; we write the software drivers, we make the firmware, it is really end-to-end. The reason we got the price down is because we got it down both on our monitors and on the PCAP screen. Part of that is economy of scale. We have a beautiful factory where we produce our own screens, where our competitors have to buy them and mark them up; we believe we have the most modern PCAP factory, it is the newest with the latest equipment. It also helps that we are not buying any of the product in and marking it up. The other part is this new “90 series“ of gaming
monitors just announced. We have made a multi- million dollar investment in this new PCAP production, and an investment in our new monitor family. Usually, you might do one new size at a time, but we have done the entire range at once, from 10” to 27”, which is 11 different sizes and with 50 or more possible variations within that. There are economies there because there are common electronics to all of them. We also have common tooling for the monitors, and have been able to buy the materials to build in bulk as well. It all comes together to make a superb price possible.
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