In the sequel Back to the Future II Marty McFly travels 30 years into the future to 2015 to save his family. Upon his arrival, he is greeted by his Japanese boss on a wall-sized video display in the home. While writer/director Robert Zemeckis didn’t get the world business domination by the Japanese quite right, he may have been spot on with video wall displays in the home by 2015.

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor

Now Runco is making Zemeckis’ future vision more of a reality with the introduction of the WindowWall tiled LCD display system targeting high-end homes. Runco’s initial idea is to use the display to help create moods or a "virtual window" in a room based on any image the user chooses–rather than making the WindowWall the primary display. The reason in part is the resolution, Runco’s video wall supports HD but in 720p resolution, not full 1080p. And, for a company built in the tradition of Sam Runco, that’s just not good enough. So for now the company will target "digital ambience" and look to combine the tiled display system with home automation, etc.

Truth be told–this is a repurposed product for Runco’s consumer marketing group, as parent company Planar Systems introduced the tiled display solution back in January 2010 under the Clarity banner (another Planar acquisition targeting the digital signage market).

But the WXGA 46-inch panel isn’t made by Runco, or Planar–but rather panel maker Samsung in the form of its 460UT series, that was first shown in the US at Infocomm-2008. The groundbreaking panel boasts a 46-inch diagonal with just 7.3-mm distance between images, (not the individual panel bezel thickness.)

The company achieves that dimension by using different bezels on the left and top and on the right and bottom of each display. Samsung created a super-narrow bezel space that measures a mere 2.4 mm on the right and bottom and 4.3 mm on the left and top of the screen. When combined in a matrix (video wall configuration) the total bezel distance is a mere 7.3 mm, creating a windowpane effect that is quite compelling. Viewers look past the very thin pane as if looking out a window to view the image displayed on the screen. For details, see the May ‘09 Large Display Report (p. 38.)

Beyond Clarity, and its Video Wall version of the Samsung panel, NEC has also been selling the thin bezel display in the out of home (OOH) market since early 2009 in its X461UN product line. But Runco is the first consumer company to pick up the banner of tiled video displays in the home and run with it.

There is more to the story, and that is on the video processing side. When you build a multi-megapixel wall display like this, resolution for a single image can jump well beyond Full-HD, so the Runco decision not to use the tiled system as a primary display is a bit puzzling.

In our May 2009 story on the Samsung panel, we also covered HiPerWall software running in the Samsung booth at InfoComm, and used to control the tiled displays. Jeff Greenberg, CEO of a UC-Irvine incubator company called TCoast Works told us that his group, along with UCI’s Dr. Sung Jin Kim and Professor Stephen Jenks, formed HIPerWall Inc., a company offering management software that sends a simple sync and control command set from the control node to the 40 individual display nodes.

The technology is based on research done by Kim and Jenks at UCI, applying principles of parallel computing to display images. "This is not a lot of data going from the controller, so the response is extremely fast. Because of this, we can leverage every pixel to get much greater granularity," Greenberg said. "We get fine detail on a very large expanse — you can see the forest AND the trees." The software also can scale up to an unlimited number.

The caveat, for this approach, each display needs to have an embedded PC–populate one of the open slots in the thin bezel LCD panel. Essentially, the approach sends only a part of the full image to each embedded, which then scales it to display at its native resolution. That adds to the cost, but for Runco, cost was never a barrier in the past. So, perhaps it’s the "window" effect that keeps Runco from moving in this ultra high resolution direction. We plan to get more details from Runco and will include this in our Large Display Report, that publishes on April, 1. So stay tuned.