I’ve been helping a friend design a digital signage system for use at the many trade shows he attends each year on behalf of a technology publication. His goals for the display include that it be portable enough for him to transport in a small van, along with all his other exhibit gear and supplies, and light enough that he can assemble it alone. Because his company’s main product is textual content, its static trade show displays tend to get lost among the sea of far-more-tangible products that decorate neighboring exhibits.
In my opinion, the solution is dynamic, multimedia digital signage, but his design goals occasion another limitation. While most of the trade show venues he visits are expansive halls that can accommodate truly impressive exhibits, some restrict the height of his displays to just 8 feet. His typical exhibit is arranged with the video displays behind him and his fellow representatives, leaving a narrow space between head height and that 8-foot limit for digital signage. Three 42-inch (diagonal) 1920 x 1080 (16 x 9) LCD displays would provide the span required of his typical exhibit format, but would also extend too much below head height to allow an unobstructed view.
Fortunately, Advantech has announced a new generation of digital signage displays that use LCD panel-resizing technology. Divide one of those 42-inch 1920 x 1080 displays in half along its length, and the result is a 38-inch (diagonal) 1920 x 538-resolution display that’s just half as tall, perfect for the limited space my friend has to accommodate. The result is Advantech’s new 38-inch, 16 x 4.5 DSD-5038 stretched display. Not only is the DSD-5038 proportioned perfectly for my friend’s traveling trade-show application, but its high 800-nit (cd/m2) brightness ensures that it will be visible regardless of ambient lighting, including when set up outdoors.
This new 16 x 4.5 format is available thanks to panel resizing technology. The economies of scale of the LCD display industry are such that tooling for full-run production of non-standard formats such as 16 x 4.5 is simply not feasible. But the panel resizing technology delivered by Advantech allows cost-effective production of such formats from standard display blanks. At present, Advantech offers the “1/2 cut” DSD-5038 display and a “1/3 cut” panel crafted from 32-inch 1920 x 1080 displays to create its 28-inch (diagonal) 1920 x 358 DSD-5028.
Both panels include 200- x 100-mm mounting holes that can be used to attach Advantech’s ARK-DS306 AMD G-series player, its ARK-DS520 advanced ION2-based player or its ARK-DS762 Intel Core i7/i5/i3 processor-based player, whenapplications require a unitized, all-in-one digital signage solution.
An in-depth description of this unique panel-resizing technology is available in Advantech’s white paper, New Generation Signage Displays with LCD Panel Resizing Technology.