Samsung’s The WALL All-In-One Display

Did you know Samsung’s The WALL comes in a 2K or 4K Display?

Check out this interview by Gary Kayye, Director of THE rAVe Agency, featuring Samsung’s Senior Manager, Shari Sentolowitz discussing The WALL All-In-One Display.

Samsung The WALL

Make a Bold Statement, Faster with The WALL

Power on an awe-inspiring viewing experience with The WALL All-in-One! Simply choose your size and resolution, and you’re assured of a complete, easy-to-install, brilliant solution.

The Wall from Samsung is the epitome of innovation. It constantly delivers new avenues to create unparalleled visual statements. Redefining the LED paradigm once again, The Wall now solves the biggest challenge of industry, drastically improving installation. The Wall, let it transform your business. A deep black background blankets the screen with perfect uniformity, creating a seamless canvas for purer black levels with enhanced depth that delivers unparalleled contrast and immaculate detail. Colors leap to life with spectacular vibrancy to recreate scenes as if you were there in real life. Narrower wavelengths produce RGB colors two times purer and more accurate than conventional LEDs.
Available in 3 sizes.

IAB 110″ 2K

IAB 146″ 2K

IAB 146″ 4K

Contact your Exertis Almo team for more information on Samsung.

Invest in Real Estate

INVEST IN REAL ESTATE

Three Reasons Why Moving to 4K Makes Sense on Your Desktop
Conventional wisdom (and maybe your parents or grandparents) tells us to “invest in real estate.” While this is an adage about acquiring financial wealth, the same tenets hold true for pixel count on monitors. More pixels offer flexibility in numerous ways.
Recently the creative team here at Almo Pro AV installed NEC MultiSync 27-inch 4K monitors. It was important to us to establish a common viewing platform so that each designer could pick up someone else’s work and share assets being confident that we were seeing the work as originally intended. Packing full 4K UHD resolution and a robust, simple-to-use color calibration solution, I was very excited to get my hands on this display and put it to use.

 

The other members of the team have offered their impressions of the monitor already. You can read Jeff’s thoughts here, and Diana’s perspectives here.

 

 

Modern graphic design (and nearly every other industry in the free world), is computer-based, and at its core is a visual medium. As you are all well aware, visuals on a monitor are made up of pixels and more pixels simply equals better. Apple popularized this movement with the Retina Display. Starting on IOS devices, they quickly scaled their efforts up and brought them to their notebook line and subsequently to the desktop. Other manufacturers were quick to follow and the HiDPI boom was born.

Here are three reasons why moving to 4K desktop monitors just makes sense:
First, and maybe most obviously, you can place and view numerous windows next to each other for viewing and multi-tasking – perfect for the modern power user.
Second, when paired with a capable OS and graphics card, ‘retina display’ experiences are possible. This is where (granted this is a loose example, but go with me here… ) an object will be rendered at approximately the same size on screens of the same size but different resolutions, but the one rendered on the higher pixel count screen will appear sharper to the eye given the density.
Third, and most valuable to me as a designer, becomes apparent when working in the Adobe Creative Suite. With this 4K NEC monitor, I can see more of my work at 100% magnification than ever before. Just take a look at this side-by-side photo comparing the NEC to my old Apple Cinema display.
Both images are shown in Photoshop, on the same MacBook Pro at 100% magnification. As you can see, with the additional pixel space of the NEC display I’m able to see my work completely in context, without the need for excessive zooming in and out.
The same is true of Illustrator. I can view multiple layouts in InDesign at once, and I can now view true 4K video in Premier and After Effects.
The benefits of 4K (and higher!) resolution displays is clear in design, the same can be said for any user. Imagine the number of rows of a spreadsheet that can be displayed on this type of display! Even if that’s not attractive to a customer, the increased clarity of HiDPI monitors makes them a great option.

Have any of you seen the demand for 4K on the desktop yet?

 Let us know your experiences in the comments.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this series where we’ll take a look at color calibration with NEC’s SpectraView II solution.

 

Why I’m happy my outside TV died during Football Season

I couldn’t wait for my TV to die.  Crazy, right?  Read on and I’ll explain.

More than half the TVs installed in outdoor spaces are engineered for indoor use.  And I was like most people.  Why would I spend more on an outdoor rated display when I could get something for less than half the price?  If it dies I can run out and pick up a newer model and throw it up on the wall without much down time.  And when my first display died I did just that.  I found an old plasma in the house and hung it up outside.  Eventually, as expected, its performance began to decline.

Flag on the play!

What’s the black box in the corner of my screen?

“Die, you imperfect plasma, just DIE!” I muttered to myself in the fall.  Here’s a snapshot of its demise, notice the upper right hand corner image fade.  It was only a matter of time!

(Full disclosure, Brian Rhatigan, my coworker and display expert tells me this isn’t a typical symptom of aging displays, and probably has more to do with the source.  But that doesn’t work with my story.  Read his blog here.)

"Heather's Hut"

Living in paradise has its perks

Cut to earlier this month.  A recent Polar Vortex had 75% of the country experiencing below freezing temperatures.  I was in chilly, snowy Chicago (my hat is off to those of you who can handle that!) and I couldn’t wait to get home to my beloved South Florida, the 85°+ December weather and watching the Miami Dolphins claw and fight their way to their first winning season since 2008 in my outdoor football paradise.

 

Flag on the Play!

It’s a Saturday night prime-time Dolphins v. Jets showdown in New York.  December football in-conference rivalry at its finest!  The bevvies were ice cold, the sausage dip was made, and the propane tank was full.  I was ready!  But I was unprepared for a dead display.  It was a football fail, to put it mildly.  Yes, I’d wished ill-will upon my clunky old plasma, but the timing was terrible!  I’d wanted to brag to my northern neighbors!  (Karma much?)  We watched the Dolphins trounce the Jets, 34-13 in the living room on the couch.  Booooo!

Can this be corrected in the second half?

Earlier this fall SunBrite TV introduced their new Veranda Series 4K UHD outdoor displays for full-shade outdoor spaces.  These beauties are up to 30% brighter than typical indoor TVs, and they’re weather proof!  And while that was always a major selling point for buying an outdoor display for outside, now… NOW they’re affordable!

Iguana

My Spirit Reptile

If there’s such a thing as a spirit animal, mine is an iguana.  (OK, spirit reptile).  Not glamorous, cuddly or even cute.  What we have in common, according to Wikipedia is that we thrive only in temperatures between 79-95°F.  This makes South Florida the perfect place for me to live.  And ideal for outdoor winter TV watching.

 

You can’t keep a true Dolphins fan down for long.  My Veranda is on a truck headed to South Florida.  Just in time for college bowl games and the NFL playoffs… I’m holding out hope that my Dolphins are still standing by mid-January!  Stay tuned for Part II, as I turn my Football Fail into Veranda Victory!

Do you have an outdoor setup you LOVE?  Share a picture in the comments, I’d love to see what you’ve got!

 

Seeing NEC Solutions within a Forest of Products

At Almo Pro AV we just wrapped up our 2016 E-4 AV Tour with stops in Boston and then Dallas.  Like our previous E-4s, these events offered our customers, large end-users and consultants multiple CTS-certified lectures (with RU Credits!), hands-on experience rooms and an impressive exhibit floor populated with over 50 manufacturer partners displaying the latest in technology.

Due to space constraints and other outside factors, exhibit halls in general often restrict what manufacturers showcase to individual components and not an entire working solution.  Attendees then must visualize the solution, usually by associating it with a recent or current application need.  But what if they could see an entire solution, made up of components from multiple manufacturers in a single exhibit?  This is a concept I’ve been at work on for the past few E-4 events, and the reception and feedback I’ve received is motivating.

Video Wall BackRepresentatives from well-regarded display and projector manufacturer NEC have worked with me on this concept from the beginning. Our goal is to display NEC’s superior commercial panel designs and demonstrate their functionality in a working model, such as a video wall or unique projector application.  To accomplish this we started with a video wall configuration and called on another partner, Peerless-AV to supply their specialized video wall cart.  The cart is an actual Peerless-AV sku providing video wall mounting with mobility.  Perfect for our exhibit hall floor.  Now we can easily demonstrate the features of this video wall solution and mount combination to show attendees.

TV One & NEC

 

In Dallas we took the partial solution even further.  TVOne joined our configuration to display their low-cost and feature-rich 4k video processing unit that utilizes NEC’s Tile Matrix feature.  We then insured electrical noise-free power by employing a Tripp-Lite double-conversion UPS.  The end result was a working, fully mobile 4k video wall solution.

 

Peerless & TrippLite

Peerless Kiosk (left) and Peerless-AV Video Cart (right)

Next, we wanted to demonstrate a single-panel application with a 65″ UHD Panel, mounted in portrait orientation.  Once again we called on Peerless-AV to provide a video cart capable of portrait orientation, enabling us to demonstrate the panel’s ability to change screen orientation.  One dealer group actually came by the booth that day ans offered to purchase the solution right then and there and take it back to their office!

Also popular these days are indoor kiosks, and Almo and NEC were able to bring such a solution to our E4 attendees as well.  This time we created a kiosk solution featuring a 46″ NEC panel displaying content from a BrightSign media player, all secured and ventilated within the Peerless-AV kiosk and once again powered by Tripp-Lite.

Almo is already hard at work with our partners for our March E-4 AV Tour stop in the Windy City, Chicago, IL.  Our solutions exhibits will no doubt continue to evolve and grow.  Perhaps we’ll employ a unique NEC SSL laser projector based digital signage application with portrait orientation using content provided by Almo’s Content Creation Services.  Rest assured, we’ll come up with something – and our attendees will be able to see a true solution through the forest of products on the exhibit floor.

pic

Working together and great partnerships make events like the E4s come to life. Thanks, NEC!

 

NEC’s 27″ 4K Monitor: Huge Workspace with High-Quality Graphics

Hi! I’m Diana.Before

I started working at Almo a few months ago as a Graphic Designer. Naturally, I am in front of monitors all day, every day and depending on the project/s sometimes I need to have more than two screens open at the same time. Not too long ago I had three monitors, with real “classy” stands, taking up a lot of space on my desktop. I’m in a bit of a minimalist phase, so I wasn’t really feeling it.

A few months ago, when Almo Acquired IAVI , my entire setup changed. I was given a brand new Apple laptop and I decided to only keep one of my old monitors. Although it was a really nice monitor with a good resolution for a visual artist, it was a bit too small for the type of workspace I actually needed. I was going to be forced to bring in another monitor and I was not happy about it.

Luckily for me, and in perfect timing, Almo offered me an NEC 27” 4K Monitor (MultiSync EA275UHD).  First of all, you don’t have to be a genius to set it up. Just take it out of the box, plug it in and adjust the height. Second, it’s big enough to serve as two monitors without taking up so much space on my desk, which I LOVE! Lastly but definitely not least, the resolution on this monitor is insane! The color accuracy is terrific and the quality is just beautiful.

Look at me setup now!after

Overall, I would definitely recommend this monitor to any Graphic Designer or Digital Artist out there looking to move from 1080p to 4K with a bigger workspace. It’s a keeper!

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