Boom in Display Options Challenges Pro Users

Video displays for professional and commercial applications are getting bigger, better and harder than ever to integrate and support.

The recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show (www.cesweb.org) in Las Vegas cast light on one aspect of this situation. The big show abounded in video display systems that would have been considered strictly professional products not very long ago. The show''s “Next Big Thing” award for video, for example, was won by Samsung''s new HLR6768W, a 67-inch DLP-based rear projection TV offering 1920 by 1080 resolution.

DLP systems and plasmas with screen sizes above 60 inches were relatively common, and Samsung even unveiled a new 80-inch plasma display with a sticker price in the $40,000 neighborhood. Many of these products are aimed at the home theater market, a profitable niche for a subset of AV systems integrators. But many will also undoubtedly make their way into business settings.

Texas Instruments (www.TI.com) was also at CES boasting of the new RCA Scenium Profile, a 61 inch DLP RPTV skinny enough to hang on a wall.

DLP technology got its start in business displays, but TI CEO Rich Templeton, speaking at CES, noted that for large-screen high definition TVs, the technology has “gone from zero share just two years ago to serve 16 percent of the North American market today.

“It took five years from 1996 to 2001 to ship our first million DLP units and then another three years to ship an additional two million units,” Templeton said. “But then things really accelerated when we got into the rear projection HDTV market. We've shipped an additional two million units in just the past eight months.”

Those two million units in eight months make DLP a vigorous competitor. For comparison, the Consumer Electronics Association reports that plasma unit sales should exceed 1.4 million in 2005.

Pacific Media Associates (www.pacificmediaassociates.co) has just reported on a survey of consumers that highlighted many of the product perceptions also shaping corporate buying decisions. The findings may have consequences for plasmas and DLP alike.

DLPs, for instance, were faulted by one-quarter of respondents for simply being too large -- a shortcoming products like the Scenium Profile seek to address. When it comes to plasmas, 65 percent of survey respondents said the prices were too high, and one-quarter faulted plasmas for reliability issues.

Eric Wogsberg, CEO of Jupiter Systems (www.Jupiter.com) notes that high quality displays are just the tip of the business AV iceberg these days. Companies, he says, are being driven by “the need to access ever greater amounts of dynamic information in order to make critical decisions.”

Business displays, including control rooms, are increasingly shaped by the same factors influencing other computer-driven markets, Wogsberg says, “the ability to display more sources, greater functionality and performance, flexibility, scalability for less cost.”

At Digital Projection, Inc. (www.digitalprojection.com), CEO Mike Levi also sees an increasing need for “high pixel density displays,” and says that as a result, “the use of multi-unit hard-edge and blended arrays will increase in permanent installations. Key markets include scientific, medical, visualization, engineering, command and control and simulation.”

It seems the more capable today''s video displays become, the more users will demand of them, and the more versatile systems integrators will have to be to respond to this demand.