 page 3 of 3Displays of Affection |
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Video Walls Scott Williams prefers the term LED walls when talking about what are more commonly known as video walls. “We also like to call them daylight displays. That connotes a single big screen,” says Williams, director of Quince Imaging, a large-screen staging company in Chantilly, Virginia. Because of their durability and ability to work in high-ambient-light environments, video walls are popular for delivering messages in public venues. Each device usually measures at least 40 inches diagonally and is commonly used with several others—say in a stack of two by two or four by four. [an error occurred while processing this directive] The way in which producers choose video walls has changed, according to Williams. “It used to be that the holy grail in the LED-wall industry was brightness,” he says. “Sony’s Jumbotrons were 3,000 or 4,000 nits. As soon as LED manufacturers showed that they could do up to 5,000 nits, brightness was moot—they’re all bright. Now, it’s either indoor or outdoor. Indoor is usually 1,000 NITS or less, and outdoor, 3,000 to 5,000 nits.” Another factor is pixel pitch, the distance between pixels. Indoor video walls typically have a 10 mm pixel pitch, and outdoor units, 20 mm. “Some are in between, to try to run indoor and out, but you can’t be all things to all people,” says Williams. However, he adds, using LED walls entails a trade-off. “The smaller the size, the cheaper they are—but you have to have enough vertical picture elements to resolve the imagery,” he says. “The bigger LED walls are, the better they look.”
Video walls are gaining popularity in public and sports-arena installations. One such example is the Mitsubishi MegaView Wall (www.mitsubishi-megaview.com) in the South Lobby of the American Airlines Center in Dallas. The wall “provides an added high-tech dimension to our fans’ experiences,” says Brad Mayne, CEO of Center Operating Company, the company that built the center. Equipped with Texas Instruments DLP chips (www.dlp.com), each MegaView display has a 50-inch-diagonal viewing area and shows images in XGA (1,024 x 768) resolution.  E-port, a high-tech office space situated on the Chicago River in downtown Chicago, is home to a video wall that comprises a matrix of 12 NEC (www.necvisualsystems.com) plasma monitors. Installed three units across and four units high on a curved wall in the E-port lobby, the 42-inch PlasmaSync PD (public display) series 42PD3 monitors have a contrast ratio of 1,300:1. With the NEC plasma video wall, “we wanted to set the tone of a building that gives people what they desire: greater access to information,” says Paul Fishbein, VP of E-port’s leasing agency, Amerimar Enterprises. The E-port’s developers wanted a display that could be viewed from a wide variety of angles, so Gensler (www.gensler.com), the company that designed the building, went with a video wall. The wall, with its 160-degree horizontal and vertical viewing angle, lets tenants and visitors see images clearly, even from the structure’s upper floors.
The thin profile of the displays was equally attractive. “The depth of the monitors was an advantage, especially in a commercial environment where square footage is costly,” says Joe Niziolek, president of Progressive Communications, a Lombard, Illinois, company that worked on the installation. “Rather than take up six feet with a projection cube, we’re using six inches.” Video Replay, another Lombard company, also worked on the installation. The company’s president, Ron Norinsky, said that the NEC plasma displays were attractive for another reason: They are competitively priced at $7,495 each. —Steven Klapow Source: AVVMMP RELATED FORUMS: RELATED SITES: • AV Video • Corporate Media News • Digital Producer • Presentation Master [an error occurred while processing this directive] |
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