Photo courtesy LG Electronics
By Bob Caniglia
In the beginning, there was light. Then marketer Dave Nichol (now recently departed) hooked up videocassette recorders (VCRs) to cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors in Loblaws grocery stores and early digital signage was born. Those first attempts were eventually followed by flat-panel displays (FPDs), including ubiquitous high-definition (HD) liquid crystal displays (LCDs). These initially amazed passersby with their beautiful clarity, but now are being surpassed by even higher-resolution ‘4K’ digital screens.
Technology slows down for no one. As a growing number of consumers buy 4K-quality TVs for home viewing, they will begin to wonder why the local digital signage around them does not look as good.
Where 4K digital signage has been installed so far, such as at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, Nev., it stands out, looks amazing and outshines any of the aging screens around it. It represents a very exciting development for the medium that needs to be considered in today’s plans and designs.
That said, there is no reason to panic about existing networking infrastructure having to be completely replaced or about digital signage professionals needing to learn a whole new field of technology and workflow. While some new equipment will be required, 4K digital signage can be surprisingly affordable and is compatible with almost all of the media the industry works with daily, so long as professionals focus on how to manage and route 4K-quality images.
Managing media
After HDTV debuted back in the 1990s, it took many years to gain ground on standard-definition (SD) TV, particularly in North America. Hardware that could handle HD content was initially very expensive, hindering its adoption both at the industry and consumer levels.
In stark contrast, 4K seems to have hit the ground running, as there are already faster connectivity standards and products that can handle SD, HD and 4K content all in the same device. This is the case even though 4K represents four times the resolution of HD video, with a massive 3,840 x 2,160-pixel frame size, making it all the easier for, say, quick-service restaurant (QSR) customers to read menu items on a screen from a distance.
With this larger format, however, come larger media files through the ‘pipe’ to the sign. That content needs the right connectivity hardware and routing speeds to maintain image quality as it plays out on the screen, hour after hour.
The amount of 4K content is on the rise, as the format is increasingly adopted not only for digital signage, but also by the film and TV industries. Photos courtesy RMG Networks
One wire to rule them all
One of the most promising technologies for managing digital signage is the 6G serial digital interface (SDI) standard, which allows 4K video to be transmitted along a single Bayonet Neill-Concelman (BNC) cable. As 6G-SDI is the only format that allows switching between four different media-format signals all on the same BNC connector, there is no need to tear down walls to build a new maze of different wires connected to a router. Users can simply run a 6G-SDI system at 6 Gbps and then switch as desired to 270 Mbps for SD video, 1.5 Gbps for regular HD video or 3 Gbps for 3G SDI content.
As 6G-SDI can be added without significant new costs, a single set of wires can be used to upgrade existing SDI infrastructure for various digital signage installations and locations. The ability to switch between signal formats is particularly useful given the audiovisual (AV) industry has not yet agreed upon universal broadcast standards for 4K content and, for that matter, most users have little if any 4K content ready to go.
The 6G-SDI standard is very flexible for use everywhere from recording, playback and converting from High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) to SDI to converting signals over optical fibre and even handling digital signage at live events with a production switcher. There is no reason 4K content cannot be sent from its acquisition point to a switcher adding graphics to a recorder and finally to the display, all within a cabling infrastructure set up for HD digital signage.
