Page 7 - Campus Technology, August/September 2017

AV SMARTS
deeper into how a manufacturer’s piece of equipment will integrate with his existing campus enterprise network and how he will properly manage it after installation. I also taught a couple seminars that attracted higher ed AV professionals, and the Q&A sessions there proved to be useful in hearing where their focus is these days. My topics of ADA classroom design and construction project management garnered a lot of interest.
Following are six areas that got my attention on the show floor.
1) AV-Over-IP
From the higher ed AV perspective, AV-over-IP was the most prevalent theme throughout the show, with major players like Crestron, Kramer and AMX (SVSi) showcasing their encoder/decoder offerings and quite a few midsize and smaller companies doing the same. The presence of the SDVoE (Software Defined Video Over Ethernet) Alliance shows that some manufacturers are serious about developing AV-over-IP hardware and methods with future standards and interoperability in mind. The debate of latency, bandwidth usage and video compression rages on, suggesting that this technology is still on an upward swing of development.
2) Laser Projectors
Laser offerings were king of the projector market this year. Epson’s BrightLink series has proved to be a solid player in the ultra-short-throw interactive projector market, so the company’s new 710Ui short-throw 4,000-lumen interactive laser projector will be a go-to model for many classroom designs in the near future. Flat-panel displays are surely replacing projectors in small to midsize classrooms and meeting spaces, but manufacturers continue to offer higher lumen laser projectors, making them a viable option for your larger lecture hall and theater spaces. I still stand by my opinion that classroom image sizes over 80 inches will usually fall into projection-based designs.
Epson BrightLink 710Ui
3) Audio
Typically a market that has been a bit stale for the past few years, audio brought some interesting products and trends to the table for 2017. Dante is still getting bigger and better with widespread adoption. Audio companies are going through the same digital transition that video switching went through when VGA connectors and HDMI connectors were still needed everywhere. DSPs are packed full of analog I/O connectors, Dante jacks, VoIP/POTS jacks, USB outputs, proprietary interconnect ports, logic connections and RS-232/IP control options. Pay attention to not only the DSP options you need right now, but the options you may need in the near future. A small upgrade cost now for a model with Dante or VoIP support will save you the money and headache of having to swap out the whole box in a year or two.4
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | August/September 2017
Photo: Epson