Infocomm this year was in Las Vegas and next year heads back to Orlando on its ‘East/West coast, Tick/Tock’ rhythm. I hear from those on the booths that each location tends to attract a different crowd. Clearly, though the organisers like hot weather, alternately dry and humid!
The show attracted nearly 43,000 attendees, up 10% on 2016 and 20% of attendees were from outside the US. There were 964 exhibitors who took 550,000 sq. ft (51,000 m²).
The show used to be the undisputed main event in the global A/V calendar, but has now been usurped by ISE and for lots of the firms we met at the show, there were no new hardware products as they were previewed at ISE, or, in the case of the rental and staging LED suppliers, ProLight & Sound in Frankfurt, and for broadcast at NAB, although often the event is the first chance that US dealers and integrators have had to see the new products.
However, we did hear some interesting things. PQLabs, which is a significant supplier of infrared touch technology, had an impressive demo of using the technology to identify objects using shape and colour. That could help the technology see some adoption in retail tables, although they are still likely to prefer the flat top panels of PCap tables. However, we have heard in the past that content creation is a big barrier to all sorts of technology applications in retail, so the fact that the technology can, apparently, recognise products without any special preparation, could help to enable usage.
The LED makers were all back-pedalling on CoB, as they had at ISE, ProLight & Sound and at NAB. The main ones are all releasing LED displays with encapsulating resins to make them more robust, but still using SMD LEDs. Macroblock showed the miniLED display that it had at ISE and as one of the key makers of driver chips, it is in a very good position to push forward with developments. ROE had a genuinely innovative new architecture for rental and staging LED systems that impressed us. Because of limited time, we sampled just the biggest and best of the LED makers who were present in high numbers, but were not as numerous, it seemed to us, as at ISE.
On the projection side, we were very impressed, as usual, with the high quality of the imagery, especially DPI’s ‘true 8K’ unit. It uses temporal dithering to turn an UltraHD DMD chip into an 8K display. Although at least one maker was sceptical, the company has sold the product to NHK, which has been working in this are for some time. The challenge of driving the DMD at 240fps with 10 bits means a lot of technology in the driver, we suspect. Separately, we heard from a system maker that TI has a 1080p chip that is in the 0.2″ class – previously used for picoprojection. If that is accurate, it could mean even cheaper sets.
Having said that, the value for money now being offered in projection is tremendous and laser phosphor technology is continuing to move down towards the mainstream. We were only able to have one reporter at the event, so we didn’t get a chance to talk to lamp makers about the future for lamps, but I guess that some may be planning to pull out before long, although lamps still sell well in volume applications. On the other hand, on several of the booths, only L/P technology was being shown.
In collaboration products, the drop out of the market by Microsoft for the moment is leaving space for others that want to jump in and several vendors had products on the Microsoft booth.
InfoComm 2019 will be held June 8-14, 2019, at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla.
Anyway, we hope you enjoy our report.
