Written by Guest Blogger: Bryan Cochand

Communication is crucial to any type of business, but choosing the right way to communicate can be challenging. digital signage — a term for publicly displaying important information and announcements on a large plasma, LED, or LCD screen — is a cutting-edge method for businesses or organizations to get their message out to their consumers in an economical and flexible way. Catching up to all the advantages of this method can be an easy and very lucrative improvement. So if you are looking for new methods to increase the exposure of your company or organization, it may be worthwhile to check out the benefits of using digital signage.

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Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Guest Posts

Written by Guest Blogger: Drake MacDonald from ConstructionManagement.net

In recent years, large-scale digital signs have become one of most popular forms of advertising and communication. This is largely due to the fact that these signs seem to be an incredibly effective way of reaching consumers. By using large electronic screens, advertisers and businesses are able to quickly and efficiently send messages to passersby walking on the street or driving in the cars. Not only that, but these signs also allow businesses to send targeted messages to consumers at specific locations and times. Clearly, the benefits of large-scale digital signs are endless. Yet, their seemingly complicated nature may cause you to be hesitant about constructing one of your own. However, the truth is creating such a sign is far less complicated than you might think. In fact, you don’t even need construction management experience to get a sign up and running and start attracting more customers to your store. continue reading »

Category: Digital Signage Guest Posts

DNLA Certified logo - www.dnla.org

I was doing some research about the upcoming release of the HTC Desire HD – what an impressive little mobile phone!!!… anyways I was reading the technical specifications of the unit and came across the terminology DLNA i.e “Share videos, photos, or music from your phone to your TV via DLNA®” and I asked myself what the heck is DNLA? After a bit of research I found out that DNLA stands for Digital Living Network Alliance and it’s a non profit organisation with 245 member companies. All the major screen manufacturers are members of the DNLA and the goal of the organisation is to use a specific standard based technology to make it easier for consumers to use, share digital photos, music and videos. That’s when it hit me and I started thinking on how digital signage systems could easily fall into this category. Does anyone know of any Digital Signage system manufacturer that is DNLA certified? At advertise me, we are not a digital signage manufacturer but if we were, we would spend the time and money to become DLNA certified so that our digital signage system can be easily integrated with other DLNA certified devices  like Panasonic screen or even other Digital Signage players.

If your interested in learning more on how to become DNLA certified or know more about DNLA then visit http://www.dlna.org

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

Although this video seems a bit old I found it quite interesting – specially during the weekend. It’s basically a video of an in-store interactive digital signage that transforms consumers fashion into NIKEiD designed shoes in Fukuoka Japan. It has a color analyzing programmed camera which uses the colours of the consumers clothes and it automatically designs nike shoes based on these colours. It’s a very cool idea.
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Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

This seems to be a common dilemma amongst a number of LCD/Plasma decisions in a lot of tender projects and client requirements. Do clients really know what they are asking for, and how important is screen resolution for digital signage rollouts?

Let’s clear a few things up first.

Native resolution is the fixed number of pixels on the screen. For example, if your screen has a native resolution of 1280×720 pixels, this means your screen is physically made up of 1280 pixels wide and 720 pixels high.

Maximum resolution is the highest resolution that the screen is capbable to display.

When an incoming signal to the screen does not match the native resolution, that signal must be converted (or scaled) to be displayed correctly on the screen. So lets use the same screen above, it has a native resolution of 1280×720. If an incoming signal is 1920×1080, the screen will scale this resolution down so that it can fit on the physical dimensions of 1280×720. Likewise if an incoming signal is 1024×768, then the screen will up-scale this resolution to fit 1280×720.

This process is possible because the screen has been programmed to recognise different input signals and to convert them as such. More often than not you will have a list of all the supported input signal resolution sizes, and the highest supported resolution is your Maximum resolution.

Now that we have that out of the way, lets talk about how important is screen resolution in digital signage?

In all my digital signage years until now, I have not had to focus on optimising the quality of the display in regards to picture sharpness and contrast ratio. The general technology of the Plasma/LCD screen makes up for this. What comes out of the digital signage player is just right for the display quality. The general conversation would be on how to most effectively capture consumers attention with the type of content and how it is designed.

However recently in Australia, digital broadcasting of TV networks have become more prominent and consumers are now well aware of terms like HDTV. This presence of high definition television has entered many homes and now the retail store fronts want to show this off also. Because consumers are already aware of such technology, there is an expectation on store owners to provide this service to them.

The question comes back to client requirements. Do most clients have the proper knowledge to determine what screens they want based on what they know or what they have been told? Is it important to match the right resolution of what is coming from the digital receiver into the digital signage player, and out to the screen?

We’d like to hear your point of view on this topic. There is no right or wrong answer, as each requirements are different, but we would like to hear your thoughts.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Techie, Featured Post