Commercial Television Display Buyer's Guide

Pick Your Right Display

Display technology is a part of a rapidly growing communication trend that is engaging viewers in the way they are already accustomed to retrieving information. Education, Retail customers, hospitality services, healthcare providers, and all aspects of the business world are committing to this new technology. There are several types to choose from, each with its own advantages and features. This article will highlight features and help you to choose the right Display for your needs.

What will you be using the display for?

Digital Signage messaging

Digital Signage is the most effective tool for marketing a new product, promoting awareness, engaging your audience, or communicating with staff or students. You can find Digital Signage everywhere – mall, restaurants, universities, hospital, and lobbies. It works and engages people more than email, print or static signs. Below are the stats for the effectiveness of digital Signage.

• Faster visual information
• Digital media reaches more customers.
• Digital signage attracts 63% of people’s attention, making it hard to ignore.
• Digital signs have high recall, retention and effectiveness rates
• Provides searchable maps and building layouts, getting people to exactly where they want to go.
• Companies and schools rely on digital signage.
• Communication pros use digital signage for organizational communications.
• People want to learn more about what they have seen.

In fact, if you have followed the AV industry for the last few years, you would have certainly noticed that there is considerable amount of growth on large displays and digital signage products year-over-year. It is more powerful than ever and has the potential to revolutionize the world of business. Some industries are reaping exceptional benefits from these signs.

Classroom teaching

There’s still an ongoing trend of Hybrid learning, providing online and offline classes. So, schools need technology to bring clear, detailed visuals in the classroom. This ensures that it is engaging students to enhance the lessons with vivid imagery. Advanced displays also enable the schools and universities to showcase information and events in real time to provide timely content.

Using High Ed tech encourages a hands-on learning approach, which makes it easy for students and teachers to collaborate through seamless sharing of images, videos, and ideas with peers, both in the classroom and from their homes.

Presentation

With more companies continuing to work from home due to pandemic and post pandemic, video conferencing is becoming the norm in the way we collaborate and communicate in the workplace. A large, shared screen is essential for video conferencing and presentations to work effectively.

Video meetings, webinars with business-critical conversations are increasingly happening via video conference calls. It is a great way to do a quick team sync and ensure everyone is working together as one unit. You can present your project details by sharing your screen, slide deck, or playing a video thus getting everyone on the same page. Meeting spaces using interactive flat-panel displays are more collaborative workspaces with improved convenience and high-performing productivity. They help to brainstorm concepts for the product roadmap, analyze data in a sales report, connect people over video and screen share for your conference room.

Collaboration

Collaboration displays effectively facilitates lessons, instructive games, general technological integration, and standard group-based work. They are used in business as well as in the education industry.

In the business setting, they come along with various connectivity, visibility, sizing options, and software compatibility. They come with PC interfaces, native software and tools which allow you to sync external computers, tablets, phones to properly mirror or upload necessary data in a group collaboration business setting. Collaboration Displays are also used to facilitate remote collaborations through which Remote members can have project collaborations between teams located in different parts of the world. They facilitate it from a centralized location, like the company’s headquarters, and remote members can then join through collaborative tools and software thus providing solutions to limitations imposed by distance.

How to choose the right display size for your classroom or conference room?

Not sure of which display to go for? Below are helpful tips for right display size to support the right visual environment helping to enhance viewing experience. This guide will help you understand and decide on the screen size based on room size.

Potential size of the display

Interactive displays ranging from 55" to 98" are most suitable for most classrooms, with 65" to 84" as most popular sizes. The size of the display depends on the size of the room, the key is the display should be large enough to allow the students at the back of the class to be able to easily read a 20pt font.

Every student to be able to see content clearly from his/her seat is critical. A person’s ability to see is referred to as “visual acuity,” and it’s measured based on Snellen Eye Chart. This is based on the simple fact that something twice as far away needs to be twice as big for equivalent visibility and to achieve 20/20 vision. This means that you can clearly see a standardized chart of letters from 20 feet away. So, the further away a student is from the display, the bigger the text content should be.

For the conference room - The size of the display you select depends on the size of the meeting room. There’s no specific rule when choosing a size for your meeting room. When there are small groups of people collaborating on detailed content, such as Excel spreadsheets, Powerpoint slides, or text documents, you would need a display with high resolution for the text to appear sharply. For small-to-medium sized rooms or huddle space (less than 5 people), 65" would work. For a medium-sized meeting room(5 to 10 people), 75" would work. Whereas 86" and above are good for a board room area and beyond (i.e. more than 10 people). As for Resolution, when you are in a smaller-scale huddle room, 1080p FHD display works, for larger meeting rooms, boards, 4K/UHD (3840 x 2160 pixel) resolution works well.

The 4/6/8 Rule

The 4/6/8 Rule is widely used by audio/visual professionals to determine the right size Displays for classrooms, conference rooms and large venues. This rule states that ideal viewing distance, in correlation with room size, should be four, six or eight times the height of the screen for proper viewing. This supports the idea that students should be within certain distances of a display for different types of viewing.

 

The differences in the types of viewings are:

• Analytical Viewing – (small font text and numbers, Charts, web content browsing) : Viewers can make critical decisions from the ability to analyze details within the displayed image.
• Basic Viewing –(Presentation containing detailed images, multimedia curriculum, information displays): Viewers can make basic decisions from the displayed image and are actively engaged with the content.
• Passive Viewing – (informal viewing of video and data, like movie watching) : Viewers are passively engaged with the content and able to recognize what the images are on a screen and understand the general intent of the displayed image.

Sometimes there is a primary flaw with the 4/6/8 - while it defines an absolute maximum, it does not define an optimal experience.

Classroom vs Conference room considerations

With more employees and students who still work remotely or while travelling, Classroom and Conference room AV has become more and more popular as they provide open-ended solutions for learning, collaborating, brainstorming sessions, video conferencing or formal presentations.

Apart from the actual size, how do you choose the right display for a Classroom and Conference room? Below are some considerations and features to look for when choosing one.

Type of displays

LED TVs

LED TVs are simply familiar ones that we have in our living room which are the most popular and most accessible options for adding technology to the classroom. It’s simple – plug and turn it on. Today’s models have a basic function of connectivity that allows to play video or show a presentation from a nearby laptop/tablet. TVs are more budget friendly and readily available; this can be a viable option.

However, it is limited to just playing a video and looking up information online. If you are looking for more than true interactivity, then you need to look for Interactive displays.

Interactive Displays

Interactive Displays are LCD screen, though they look like TVs, they are much more than that. They have touchscreen features that make them interactive i.e. touch and pen-enabled, multiple people can use them at once as large as 85".

Pros of Interactive Display

• Provides a High-Resolution image that works well specially in classrooms with glare from windows or overhead lightning. They use LED technologies which continues to advance, and display costs goes down.
• Interactive display is easy to implement in the classrooms – mount to a wall or place it on a moveable stand.
• You could also use the built-in computing power, connect your own computer and bring other mobile devices together to share content wirelessly, making it easy to work on your online curriculum.

Challenges in Interactive Flat Panel display

• Firstly, it might be confusing or overwhelming trying to determine which size to use. If too small, there’s risk of visibility for the entire class. Too large, this would increase the installation costs in mounting and set up. So, listed out the additional tips and guidance in this article as how to select for the appropriate size.
• Secondly, some displays offer proprietary software or limited software connectivity which require third-party add-ons. So, you would need to find out more about connectivity. Some of the systems only connect to other platforms via specific apps which limits the ability to connect across the class and increased cost of providing connectivity to all the students.
• When you look for Interactive Displays, look for the ones that integrate Multiple functionalities in one product – like screens sharing or a digital decoder. These small inclusions can add up to big cost savings.

Size and Content

Other than the type of display, you might want to find out exactly how you intend to use it.

• If the primary purpose is to show videos, then a smaller display would work.
• If you want to show Web pages and slides with a lot of Texts, then a larger display with single-user interactivity might suffice.
• And if the goal is to have multiple students interacting collaboratively and simultaneously on the display, then a large screen size with flexible touch interactivity is the best option.

As for the Business setting, if you want a display for small meeting rooms where few groups of people are collaborating on detailed content, like Spreadsheets, PowerPoint slides or any texted contents, you will need a high-resolution display for the text to appear clearly.

When you are in larger conference or long lecture halls and want to do video conferencing, apart from the projector, consider two displays – one for viewing content and the other one to see the audience on the far end of the call. Multiple displays allow viewers around the room to read the content more easily.

So the layout of the space can affect the size and number of displays you choose.

Collaboration Software

Interactive display technologies rely on embedded interactive software to deliver annotation/inking capabilities and other collaborative features. When choosing a display technology, look for ones that come pre-loaded with robust collaboration software which allows both teachers and students to work on solving the same problem and share information to a display. Through this, displays can be split-screened so that multiple students can use them at once. Collaborative software and wireless presentation systems allow teachers and students to share content from their mobile devices and display their screen for the class to see.

There are some displays that come with built-in Android Operating system, along with it comes with an Ethernet network interface (LAN- RJ45 Connection) or with embedded Wi-Fi capability. This means that you switch the Interactive Flat Panel on without having any computer connected to it. So you can browse the web, run an annotation program and other Apps that are available for the Android operating system. The drawback - this does not have access to the Google Play store, as the Google license is incredibly expensive, so it's a good idea to check what the display is offering in terms of annotation App.

Similarly in a corporate setting, you can make the meeting room a fully collaborative, interactive experience for all the participants to encourage the sharing of ideas and higher levels of comprehension among colleagues. With embedded Android OS, it allows you to start meetings in an instant. Also make sure they also support Microsoft Office file formats like work, PowerPoint, Excel that are commonly used. This works well when you are having a huddle, urgent meeting, or some participants who bring a laptop for a meeting.

Consider Cloud connectivity, which is a collaborative tool for saving and sharing documents via cloud drives. As opposed to some older devices which are not able to offer cloud-based connections, OneDrive and Google Drive should be regarded as essential features for Business and educational settings.

Multiple touch-points

We are seeing an increase in popularity in multi-touch interactive displays. Before first-generation interactive screens often only featured basic “button pressing” technology, however for more sophisticated interactive, there’s 2-point multi-touch, and then a 10pt, 15pt, 20pt touch-points are available. With 2-point touch, you can have two students at the Interactive at any one time, along with some gestures like pinch to zoom and twist to rotate. To find out how many touch points you need, you can ask yourself how many students will typically be working at the display, and how many of them can be comfortable working at the display at the same time. Keep in mind, due to the multi-touch screen, the software has to be designed to be ‘multi-touch friendly’.

When there are large screens mounted in a landscape orientation for classroom and corporate meeting rooms, multiple users interaction is involved, anywhere between 4 and 20 touch points is recommended. Different environments will cater to different user experiences, each requiring for a different number of touchpoints.

Commercial vs Consumer TV considerations

Typically, a consumer TV which is designed just for viewing TV at home are less expensive than commercial grade displays and are not interactive. You are using Consumer TV at home to watch Blu-ray, streaming services etc. which are used a few hours a day. Whereas a commercial Displays are specifically designed for digital signage. They are built for long hours to operate in commercial environments like lobbies, restaurants, malls, etc. Sometimes the amount of time is typically being used for 24/7 and 365 days in a year. Commercial displays are designed to operate in both landscape and portrait modes. Commercial displays recognize all PC resolutions including wide formats and different refresh rates (1024x768 @60, 72, 75, 85Hz) in addition to TV/video resolutions. Whereas Consumer displays are designed for home theater entertainment in specific TV/video formats with very limited PC resolutions.

Because of the differences in these two displays, there are features to be looked at when deciding to them.

Size

Earlier a 42 and 50-inch TV seemed large enough, now TVs with 55 and 65-inch screens are common for consumer display at home. There is no hard-and-fast rule for determining the right size display for home, it depends on visual acuity, field of view and personal preference.

Your room size and viewing distance are to be considered when choosing a size display. You should be far enough from the display that programming looks natural. And if you’re too close, you might easily notice the individual pixels making up the image, and graininess. On the other hand, you do not want to sit so far away from the display that you are unable to perceive and appreciate the crisp detail of HD programming. Roughly you can sit at least 5 or 6 feet from a 40-47 inch set with good quality HD content and at least 6-8 feet from a 50-inch and larger display.

There has also been recommendation for a distance of 1 to 1.5 times the diagonal screen size for 4K TVs and 1.5 to 2.5 times for 1080p displays.

In commercial setting, to determine the right size of display depends on the size of the area that your screen is located and how far you expect people to be located from your TV. The bigger the TV- the more engaging and emotional your effects could be to grab the attention of the viewer. Be careful if you place a digital signage too close to viewers, the individual pixels on the image might be noticeable. In that case, you’ll want to invest in an UHD 4K TV that can be viewed super up-close without losing fidelity. For quiet large space, you can consider using a video wall by combining multiple displays. There have been technology improvements and drop in digital signage prices, so considering a stunning 4K video wall to get your message out might be a good idea.

Display Brightness

Consumer displays are designed to work well for lighting conditions that are controlled to some extent. Brightness is rated for displays in terms of Nits or Candelas squared(cd/m2). This usually falls in the range of 150-250 nits which is good for viewing at home. However higher brightness is required in commercial displays in brightly lit conditions. It can range anywhere from 300-2000 Nits for outdoor, full sunlight applications.Screen Resolution
Screen resolutions are the number of pixels arranged in a grid horizontally and vertically. Screen size and Screen resolution are not directly related. A decent resolution of HD(1920p x 1080p) sounds good for a good video experience for Consumer display, however if you want a bigger screen(like above 40 inches), go for ultra-HD (UD) or 4K(3840p x 2160p) resolution.

There are 8K TVs available &emdash; however broadcasting compatibility with 8K resolution does not exist yet, so we're seeing a bit of a repeat from the 4K revolution starting to happen, i.e. early adopters seeking the enhanced resolution will be paying a premium price until manufacturing capabilities are ramped up and the prices start to come back down.

For the digital signage purpose, viewing distance also plays a role for selecting screen resolution. If the display is going to be viewed from a long distance away, you can get away with less resolution, most print billboards are also fairly low resolution. Whereas for up-close impact and fine detailed content, higher resolutions works better. 4K display gives more sharper and detailed images that makes your text sharper and easier to read, which can lead to higher sales and better customer interaction.

Control

Consumer TVs typically do not have RS232 control, and if it has, it is extremely limited in functionality or is mostly used for input switching, whereas commercial displays will often have full RS232 and RJ45 control which allows the owner to control and monitor screens without a remote. This is an essential function for digital signage as it allows the precise management of screen functions, features using a computer. You can adjust which television sound you want to hear, the contents and channel displayed using a central controlling remote system. It has public security features to protect controls in a public environment that includes locking of front panel and IR remote lockout.

High Dynamic Range (HDR)

Recently, HDR is the most exciting feature in TV displays. This boosts a TV’s brightness, contrast, color, making the picture look vibrant and real life. So if you are looking for realistic colors and better contrast, look for HDR- Compatible set. HDR brings out a vast difference between the dark and bright parts of a scene producing a more detailed, punchy image that really stands out. HDR formats such as Dolby Vision push this even further and are available through streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and on Ultra HD blu-rays.

HDR is important in commercial display as well. It’s the latest trend and the prices for HDR displays are coming down. The future of HDR is now certain to expand into all large screen entertainment displays, especially tiled seamless LEDs and does have huge a impact on the commercial industry as well.

Smart TV platform

Among the overwhelming number of TV displays on the market, most mid size and larger models are Smart TVs that come with a bundled software. They can access online content such as streaming video services from Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu etc. Others also offer a vast assortment of apps, i.e. smart TVs can respond to voice commands, using microphones built into the TV’s remote control or using an app on a smartphone. And if you don’t want to go for Smart TV, you can smart-ify a non-smart TV with an HDMI input by attaching a streaming device like Roku or Fire TV.

When it comes to Digital signage, do not get too caught up about the Smart TV features as they are often irrelevant. Instead focus on the ones that come with hardware features which can boost performance.

Often Overlooked Display Features

Data security

Data security is the overlooked feature when determining the Interactive Display. There needs to be a provider to offer the high level of data encryption and protection with a foundation of security technologies designed to harden and protect the entire device stack against attacks. Embedded device security offers Real-time protection ,Deep Scan, Web Browsing Security and Wi-Fi security functions.

Cost and durability

Price ranges from a few hundred dollars for Consumer TV display to a few thousand dollars for a large 4k Commercial TV Display. When deciding between Consumer TV and Commercial TV display for digital signage display, cost is a big part of the purchase decision. Though Commercial TV have a higher initial monetary outlay than the Consumer TV, they will outlast a consumer TV. In the long run, they cost less as they use higher grade components to act more reliably during the time of more intense usage. So for commercial settings, we recommend a Commercial digital signage display over a Consumer TV – it’s durable, has longer warranties, ability to be controlled over LAN, ability to schedule being turned on and off.

Uniformity in Appearance

Another overlooked feature is the fact that consumer TV often change its appearance with each model change for about every year. Bezels(screen borders) often changes in thickness and color and displays become thinner with each iteration. Whereas in Commercial TVs, they maintain the same cosmetic look for years, which works very well when adding panels for display especially for video wall purposes. So, when you are adding displays in your facility year after year, you can maintain the same look and feel with commercial ones.

In Summary

When you are looking for displays for your school, business, consumer or commercial setting, knowing these differences and features can help you plan which one to go for. If you need further help in identifying your needs and recommendations, feel free to reach out to us. We’re here to help!