Tips for Designing a Video Wall: Understanding Customer Requirements and Environment
Video walls are impressively large screens created by tiling multiple displays together. Displays such as LCD panels or OLED panels, DVLED displays, projector screens, and rear-projection cubes are all used to compose video walls. The purpose of a video wall is to present content with high visual impact and critical details to attract and hold viewer attention.
Video walls are used for delivering information or advertising products in places such as control rooms, meeting rooms, broadcast stations, airports, retail stores, and others. What’s more, cases where giant video walls are being used as landmarks to attract people are increasing.
Displays used for video walls have a narrow bezel to minimize video distortion between the screens, provide functions of operating content and controlling monitors for multiple displays (Video/LAN/RS-232C Daisy Chain), and require coupling with a Content Management System (CMS) for content operation.
Video walls differ according to the installation environment (size, structure, surrounding brightness) and targeted content. The types and characteristics of the display products and CMS must be understood to suggest the optimized solution based on the information obtained. The total funds and operational complexity may differ greatly depending on the type of displays and models chosen, so the optimized solution can be suggested only after thoroughly understanding the customer’s needs.
LCD video walls can only be installed on flat structures since the displays cannot be custom-curved, but OLED or DVLED displays can be curved. If video walls are needed to be installed on curved surfaces, OLED or DVLED displays may be selected.
With DVLED, the distance to discern individual pixels changes, depending on the ‘pixel pitch’ (distance in millimeters from the center of a pixel to the center of the adjacent pixel), so an appropriate pixel pitch display must be chosen according to the viewing distance. If the viewing distance is short, LCD or OLED could be a better choice than DVLED.
It is better to use displays with high brightness if the video wall is being installed in a bright environment, and products with high haze for the surface of the screen are better for places where the visibility of the content may be disrupted by reflected light. Especially the video walls for broadcasting stations require a product that can change the color temperature according to the surrounding lighting, so knowing what products are available by understanding the light temperature beforehand is necessary.
The content type that is to be used in the video wall must be selected before employing a video wall. It must be known if it will be used for simple videos or images, if there are various external inputs or interactive content displayed, and what the content changing cycle is, to select the best CMS and operate a video wall accordingly. The overall system components and surrounding equipment may differ depending on the chosen CMS, so understanding this prior to the installation is necessary.
Next week we’ll go over some guidelines for selecting the right video wall displays based on the installation space and requirements.