Eizo has a well established business in air traffic control having got into the business after the acquisition of Tech Source in the US back in 2007 and EG-Electronic of Wolfratshausen. The monitors for the ATC and control tower applications are still made in that facility, south of Munich in Germany (which also makes some industrial and special transport monitors for railway use and even for Aston Martin cars)
The big news was really related to the direction of the division which is moving more to developing full systems – a strategy that the whole company may be moving towards, we heard. In ATC, that means that Eizo is working on developing and selling systems for capturing everything that goes on in an ATC environment – including voice, video screen data and other data. That is essential for life-critical applications such as ATC so that if anything goes wrong, there is an ‘audit trail’ that can be studied to learn what happened.
The monitors on display included the Raptor SQ2825, a 28.1″ 2K x 2K monitor that was launched in 2016, which is the fifth generation of 2K monitors that the company has made. Features include a direct backlight system that has LEDs in four quadrants. It can be adjusted to run at outputs from 2 cd/m² to 500 cd/m². Typically the monitor would be calibrated at 250 cd/m² but the extra capacity ensures a very long life. Staff told us that 28″ 2K x 2K monitors are still the most popular choice.
We then looked at a 31.5″ UltraHD monitor that was just a prototype and uses an IPS panel with output from 10 cd/m² to 500 cd/m². It is designed to work well as a ‘Tower monitor’ – that is to say a monitor to be used for tracking aircraft when they are on the ground.
There are two DVI inputs and two DisplayPort and the monitor has a PCap touch panel. Staff told us that they had done a lot of work to decide how to make a PCap display that looks good despite the high resolution and with good anti-glare properties. So staff were coy about revealing the technology used! The company already has 19″, 21.3″ and 24.1″ (16:10) monitors for this application.
The aim of showing the monitor was to get feedback from potential and current customers.
The monitors have a very clear and simple brightness control on the front of the monitor (the big knob!) and there is no ambient or presence sensor as in this application, adjustment is typically left to operators. However, the brightness setting can be checked and adjusted remotely if desired by Eizo’s own control software.
The company was also showing the RP4325, a 3840 x 2160 monitor that is fanless and can be used where controllers also want other information alongside the radar display. The monitor supports 25 cd/m² to 500 cd/m² of output. The company also has a 57.5″ VA panel-based UltraHD monitor.
