THE FRONT LINE: JULY 2009
INFOCOMM 2009 Report
Attendance was better than expected. Leads were strong. And it finally appears that the professional AV industry is ready to take the digital video plunge.
After the marked and alarming decline in attendance at both CES and NAB, it was refreshing to see strong crowds at the commercial AV industry’s premier trade show, held in steamy Orlando this year…although I can tell you that trading 105-degree temperatures at 10 PM in Vegas for the 90s with near 100%-humidity and daily thunderstorms isn’t much of a improvement.
The down economy and daily bad news about employment, spending, and consumer confidence had all of us involved with the show wondering just who would show up, and what if anything they would be willing to spend?
Figure 1. The NEC booth was enormous, but they only used a teensy bit of it. Weird layout…
Turns out, our fears weren’t justified. As was the case at NAB, it appeared that ‘tire kickers’ and lesser functionaries from dealerships constituted most of the MIAs. An informal poll I took on the second morning of the show showed that a majority of exhibitors had already reached at least half of their expected lead generation quotas, with some doing better.
On the education front, classroom enrollment turned out to be about 40% stronger than the Professional Education and Training Committee’s worst-case estimate. Although I taught only one class this year (the Super Tuesday Display Technology Trends session) due to a schedule conflict, 187 people showed up to participate — and in a good year, that number is usually capped around 200.
The slowing economy had more than a few manufacturers talking about scaling back their presence in Orlando, or skipping the show altogether. Lo and behold, all of those companies (save one) showed up at InfoComm anyway, although some of them (like Pioneer and Barco) had greatly truncated booths.
Among major Japanese exhibitors, only JVC skipped the festivities entirely, true to their word as uttered to me at NAB. InFocus had a small, lounge-type booth at the rear of the hall that was unmanned (people used it to eat food and work on laptops).
Figure 2. Now, THAT’s a thin mullion for a Samsung LCD monitor!
Figure 3. 103” too big? 65” too small? Then Panasonic’s got your perfect plasma size.
NEC had one of the stranger booth designs, with a tall, upswept drape arrangement that took up about 20% of their enormous floor space and which commemorated NEC’s Best of InfoComm awards. On the other hand, Crestron, Extron, AMX, Sanyo, Samsung, Panasonic, Digital Projection, and projectiondesign had enormous stands to show off their wares, several of which were tented to keep stray light out.
To assist in ensuring the most ‘bang’ for attendee travel budgets, ICIA scheduled its Institute for Professional Development courses to run on Monday and Tuesday, concurrent with the Projection Summit conference and Super Tuesday sessions. Registrations at the Summit did appear to be hit by the economy, although not decimated as appeared to be the case at the Society for Information Display’s annual event, just two weeks earlier in San Antonio.
One clear trend at InfoComm is the growing number of startup companies exhibiting each year. I like to walk the aisles and search out these newcomers, many of whom are small manufacturers or importers but still have groundbreaking or price-busting products to show.
Not surprisingly, many of those companies were showing digital display and video products, with a good deal of emphasis on HDMI interfacing, switching, and distribution, along with format converters between digital streams like SDI and HD-SDI and HDMI. There were also examples of HDMI over coax, optical fiber, and Cat5 wiring in abundance. (All ironic, considering the general antipathy most AV systems integrators have towards HDMI connections!)
Figure 4. The Texas Instruments DLP booth showed eight different classroom 3D projectors, which could also be seen in action at participating exhibitor stands.
Figure 5. A Coretronics (Optoma) installation LED-powered DLP projector prototype was on display in the same booth.
3D was another big deal at the show. Texas Instruments made 3D a big part of its booth, with manufacturing partners including projectiondesign, Sharp, Christie, and Mitsubishi showing both active and passive 3D demonstrations. Apparently TI sees lots of potential in 3D for classroom projection, and I’d have to agree.
Surprisingly, most of the 3D DLP products shown were not high-margin projectors, but sub-$1K models. Only projectiondesign and Christie had offerings with any decent margins for AV dealers. One executive at a veteran projector company told me privately that “giving away” something new like 3D DLP was distressing to dealers in a business where it’s hard to get any decent margins on projector sales.
Illumination was another big story this year. It’s not going to happen tomorrow, or even next year, but eventually projector manufacturers will have to find a new source of light and move away from short-arc lamps that contains salts of toxic metals, such as mercury.
To that end, a few companies showed LED-powered front projectors, including Christie, projectiondesign, and Vivitek. I used the latter’s 1920x1080 LED home theater projector during my Super Tuesday session to show a brief Blu-ray movie clip, and was surprised at just how bright the image was on the room’s 10x16 screen — even with the room lights at 50% brightness.
It was also heartening to see more digital video and IPTV products on the floor, including MPEG-based video conferencing and distance learning solutions, lower cost MPEG encoders, and numerous hard drive video players and servers.
For installers who haven’t yet taken the digital plunge, digital media backbones are the way to go for new installations — they’ll work over coax, Cat5, fiber optics, and even fast wireless connections. And everyone travels in one cable — video, audio, and control signals.
I couldn’t teach my Digital Video 101 course this year (again, due to the aforementioned scheduling conflict) but it will return to InfoComm 2010 and emphasize more about MPEG standards, encoding, video over IP, and advanced signal distribution. The commercial AV industry is one of the last to embrace 100% digital infrastructures, unlike our IT and broadcast cousins. It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee!
Figure 6. RGB Spectrum’s MediaWall 4500 leaves PC video processing out of the mix.
Digital signage continued to dominate the show, as it has for the past five years. Mitsubishi, NEC, Samsung, Sony, Barco, Christie, Sanyo, Creston, Extron, AMX, RGB Spectrum, and countless others had displays, software, servers, and turnkey DS solutions out for inspection. Interestingly, it is these products that are leading the charge away from analog and into digital signal distribution.
What follows is a list of some of the more interesting products and demos I spotted in my 1 ½ days wandering the Orange County Convention Center. Some of them were previewed publicly or privately at NAB, while others were surprises.
Samsung has a super-thin bezel on its new line of UT-series LCD monitors for digital signage. This approach reminded me of the nearly bezel-free Pioneer and Toshiba videowall projection cubes seen a decade ago. The bezel area on two adjacent displays has now been reduced to just 6.7 millimeters, or a little over 2.5 inches. This presents a nearly seamless look to tiled displays.
Casio has what must be the thinnest WXGA DLP projector on the market today. The XJ-S43W weighs all of 4 pounds, and measures just 1.69” in height. Yet it is rated at 2500 lumens with 1280x800 resolution, 2x power zoom and focus are included, as are VGA and HDMI connections. There’s also a USB stick wireless 802.11 adapter that can drive up to four projectors at the same time.
Sanyo showed the first purely wireless classroom projector. The PLC-WXU700 is a 3LCD design with 1280x800 resolution and on-board decoding support for MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, and Windows Media files. It’s also ready to connect to an 802.11n wireless network with a simple, USB-based set-up tool. Brightness is rated at 3800 lumens, which ought to be more than bright enough for any classroom.
Figure 7. Sharp’s classroom 3D demo used Flex active shutter glasses, which aren’t exactly cheap right now.
Pioneer had a couple of interesting products in its booth. First off is their BDP-V6000, a commercial-grade Blu-ray player with BonusView and BD Live. Although the V6000 is the blue laser successor to Pioneer’s line of durable laserdisc and DVD players, I don’t really see this as a strong seller in the pro AV channel, even though it comes with RS232 support and an advanced playlist scheduler.
But their other product should be much more popular. The HD-V9000 is a hard drive media player that supports MPEG2 at a maximum data rate of 80 Mb/s and MPEG4 AVC at 50 Mb/s. It’s IP-compatible for remote operation on a network, supports text crawl and image overlay, and accepts SD/SDHC memory cards for uploading content. The only catch? No HD-SDI connectors yet, a problem I asked them to remedy pronto before the HD-V9000 launches later this year.
Sharp is also big on widescreen imaging this year. The XG-560W is a three-chip DLP projector with 1280x800 resolution and 5200 lumens of brightness, plus power zoom, motorized lens shift, and seven interchangeable lenses. For folks with more modest budgets, there’s the PG-F325W, a 3000-lumen WXGA projector with BrilliantColor, DVI-I input, and Ethernet connectivity. Sharp also showed a 3D demonstration with DLP Link to synchronize active shutter headsets.
projectiondesign’s huge tent had something for everyone, including the FL32 LED-based projector. This chassis is available with either 1920x1080 or 1900x1200 DMDs and has a life expectancy of 100,000 hours, according to the press release. The company also had three different demos of 3D imaging, with high-speed active stereo on the company’s F10 AS3D platform, passive stereo with a pair of F32 projectors, and a low-cost anaglyph solution based on the F22 projector.
Figure 8. Heads up -12,000 lumens of Epson 3LCD imaging are flying by!
Panasonic has yet another glass cut for its plasma line. Although it doesn’t have a model number quite yet, this is a Series 12 glass cut and it offers full 1920x1080 resolution. Look for a SRP in the range of $30K to $35K when it finally comes to market. Panasonic also had other interesting demos to remind visitors just how far LCD has to go to match plasma image quality.
InFocus (who was actually holed up at the nearby Peabody Hotel) is back in the AV dealer game with six new fixed install DLP projectors. The IN5300 series is rated at 4000 lumens and is available in 1024x768 and 1280x800 resolutions and comes with horizontal and vertical lens shift. Meanwhile, the IN5500 series takes brightness up to 5000 lumens and adds optional lenses, while the 5530 series is rate at 7000 lumens with the same resolution and interchangeable lens options.
LG’s unique “triple view” LCD monitor now has a model number. It’s the 47-inch M4714V, and its front screen can present three different images simultaneously. The image you see depends on your angle to the screen. A touchscreen version of this product has a super-thin 36mm bezel to fit in better with its surroundings. LG also showed a beautifully-designed program guide and “what to do” GUI for hospitality markets that is better suited to widescreen, HD flat panel TVs than most of what is currently installed in hotels.
BenQ showed a new short-throw DLP projector that has a .6:1 throw ratio. The MP776ST is rated at 3500 lumens, includes BrillantColor with a six-segment color wheel, and is outfitted with an XGA (1024x768) DMD. Its Ethernet interface supports Crestron’s RoomView control system as a standard feature.
Contemporary Research has a new broadband RF modulator. The QMOD-HD accepts composite or component (YPbPr) analog video plus stereo analog or SPDIF audio, and creates a single 64QAM or 256QAM 6 MHz RF channel. MPEG2 encoding is standard and the product includes variable bitrate encoding from 7 to 38 Mb/s rates.
Figure 9. Hmm…the sign says InFocus, but there’s no projectors…or card readers…or booth personnel…
The Vivitek LED DLP projector I mentioned earlier now has a model number (H9080HD) and is rated at 800 lumens brightness, more than adequate for a darkened room with 16:9 screens measuring up to 92 inches after calibration. It’s illuminated by a Luminus PhlatLight module and is free of any sequential color breakup artifacts. Gennum provides the onboard deinterlacing and motion adaptive processing. A 1.3:1 zoom lens with ±120 degrees vertical and ± 30 degrees horizontal lens shift rounds out the package.
Away from the show floor, several manufacturers demonstrated prototype and production models of picoprojectors at the Projection Summit. LG Electronics had two samples that used DLP technology with quarter and half VGA resolution. 3M Projection Solutions had a 15-lumen design with a VGA-resolution LCoS imager, while bTendo’s demo employed lasers and scanning mirrors for a 10-lumen image and a maximum resolution of 8x8 x 480 pixels.
Other demos include three different Micron Technologies ferroelectric LCoS picoprojectors projecting at 392x224, 300x224, and 800x600 resolutions, a WVGA scanning mirror prototype from Microvision, and another laser configuration from Jabil rated at 12 lumens with 480x320 pixels that is intended to be built right into a media player.
Figure 10. Ever wonder what the inside of an LCoS projector looks like? Well, now ya know…
Canon showed their REALis WUX10 (1920x1200) LCoS projector, outfitted with DICOM simulation for medial education. DICOM stands for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) Part 14, and is a standard for showing monochromatic images with a super-wide grayscale for analyzing x-rays and other medical images as part of lectures and continuing medical education.
And Wide UXGA isn’t just for LCoS and DLP projectors anymore. Epson took the wraps off its PowerLite Pro Z8000WUNL (is that model number long enough?), a 6000-lumens 3LCD installation projector with 1920x1200 resolution. Standard features include an automatic cycling air filter that goes 10,000 hours between changing, mechanical lens shift, Ethernet connectivity, and six interchangeable lens options.
Finally, RGB Spectrum had two cool demos. First off is their MediaWall 4500, a multi-screen tiling engine with embedded image processing that doesn’t depend on a computer to do the work. The demo had 36 16x9 tiles of active video running on a 3x3 wall of LCD monitors. Around the corner, the MultiPoint KVM is a multiple monitor KVM processor/driver that allows mouse cursors to seamless jump from one monitor to another, or across multiple groups of monitors.
