Article

Invisible costs lurk behind the video wall

Retail owners often fail to take into account installation cost as part of their TCO when selecting displays for digital signage video walls, failing to take into account color calibration, cable routing, display alignment and control mechanisms.

December 16, 2014

By Glen Young, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Envision Peripherals Inc. for Philips Signage Solutions North America

Total cost of ownership or TCO is a key issue associated with digital signage. A multitude of experts in this area have a multitude of opinions. So what cost factors should the retailer consider when taking the big plunge into a video wall?

Since TCO continues to be a gray area, with numerous interpretations and versions, the retailers tend to care less about the minutiae and focus solely on the obvious, which is the cost of displays and content — and very little consideration is given to the dollar outlay needed for installation work. However, that retailer soon experiences a sudden shock when learning that installation costs have gone through the roof.

Couple that naïve "inexpensive display and content cost" mindset with any of the significant number of video wall manufacturers who could fall anywhere on a broad spectrum of technical installation foundations. That's exactly what A/V installers are hoping for to eliminate costly, difficult and time-consuming work. Some of the considerations involved are such installation aspects as color calibration, cable routing, display alignment, control mechanism and an assortment of other factors.

For example, there can be a great number of hours devoted to alignment adjustment, routing the video and control cables, configuring individual displays and fixing color temperature/contrast/brightness across the number of displays comprising the video wall. All of this devours a lot of dollars in labor hours.

Also, it's not unusual for retail owners to haphazardly decide on inexpensive wall mounts to save a few extra dollars. What they don't consider is that the quality of a wall mount (or lack thereof) carries with it the highest potential of creating a major display alignment issue during installation.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that poorly mounted displays have a damaging effect on the video wall's appearance. Those types of cheap mounts won't sufficiently sustain a display in terms of alignment at different angles. When one display tilts down or slides sideways, the whole video wall appears highly unprofessional.

On the other hand, as part of their TCO, the savvy retail owner takes a hard look at all aspects of video wall installation and evaluates the downsides of scrimping on the important aspects. For starters, they put their dollars on LCD displays that support a number of key features such as a high-quality alignment mechanism, a reduced number of required cables, simple color calibration and easy control configuration. Quite likely, there are premiums to be paid for these high-caliber features, but in the long run they return considerable value on TCO.

The retailer must heed a word of caution, however. And that is to closely investigate the product ahead of time because there are only so many video wall display manufacturers that provide all the major installation features noted above.

For instance, there are video wall displays featuring virtually zero bezel width and an alignment kit with plates and pins, which can assist installers in quickly aligning displays simply by screwing the plate on the back panel to automatically align adjacent displays. Consequently, there's no need to fork over more dollars for an expensive micro-adjustable wall mount. Cabling space and complexity leading to extra installation costs are eliminated as well. The reason is these video wall displays feature multiple built-in output video/audio and control interfaces to cascade the displays.

An easy-to-use remote control is another cost cutter that can be used to identify the display to be configured. Installers use this tool to do individual display configurations after all the displays are connected as a single wall. Using it or any one of a variety of remote controls made by different manufacturers directs all displays to respond the same way at the same time.

Lastly, TCO can get one more boost and the retailer a reduction in installation costs when color calibration is automatically performed in one simple step. Here, the best color calibration mechanism detects and records the current color/contrast/brightness status and calibrates all displays to match the ideal one — all in one swift step. An added bonus is this advanced color calibration is valuable when a new display replaces a defective one or even later after a video wall is used for a few years.

Glen Young is senior product marketing manager of Envision Peripherals Inc. for Philips Signage Solutions North America in Fremont, California, and he has two decades-plus of system design and architecture and product/strategic marketing experience spanning semiconductors, network appliances and digital signage.

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