Flat screen displays for your conference room

Friday, January 14, 2011 Goto comments Leave a comment AV Resource

The move to a wide screen format is quickly taking over the business market, are you ready?

Selecting the right flat screen for your conference room…

Not all flat screen displays manufactured today are built to any consistent standards. Whether it’s an LCD panel or Plasma technology, the results you get for displaying computer inputs can vary widely.

Many purchases today, for these displays, are not just to watch a Blu-Ray or Satellite TV source, in all it’s 1080p glory, but to also allow viewing of computer inputs – particularly in a conference room environment.

Most offer an RGB or DVI input specifically for PC’s. But buyers beware; the image from your computer or laptop may not fully fill the screen, will stretch, or distort its geometry. Many consumer grade displays may suffer from this drawback.

One of the reasons for this resolution issue simply boils down to production costs for the display manufacturers.

• They will skimp on the costs of their input scaling circuits in order to provide a more cost competitive product.
• They can still get away with advertising that they have a computer input, but many times you have to read the specifications very closely for each input type.
  - In some cases you’ll see an asterisk (*), and have to seek out the fine print at the bottom of the page. There it may say something like, maximum supported PC resolution 1024×768″. Even though you bought this big, beautiful 52″ display with a 1920×1080 pixel capability, you’ll only see approximately half the available pixels, and it may even stretch them disproportionately to fill the screen giving undesirable results.

So review and consider your specific requirements when making a selection for computer display needs.

And one more thing!

Many folks who desire a flat screen to display their computers images will want to consider changing their computers video output resolution to a widescreen format. (i.e. 16×9 widescreen format such as 1280 x 720, 1920×1080). This way, when the image is displayed, and it needs to be stretched, it’s already in a matching proportion of width vs height to the flat screen. This helps to optimize the image quality.

A side benefit is, doing so will also force you to get in the habit of creating content in this wider format as well, such as the case with power point.

Article by: Jim Mauger, Director of Engineering

AVR has the expertise to help you select your flat screen display. Contact one of our highly qualified professional to answer any questions you may have.