Commercial grade equipment, particularly video screens (such as LCD screens) generally cost around 3 to 4 times the price of their comparable size domestic cousins, this translates into many domestic vision options being used in the AV industry.
Why should you care?
The following 7 key indicators demonstrate why commercial grade video equipment is superior to their domestic counterparts, and why CVA uses and recommends commercial grade equipment whenever possible.
1) THE INPUTS
Generally, when it comes to your home, you only want the TV to talk to the DVD player or game console. Manufactures, being well aware of this, only catered for this purpose. But we know that commercial application of vision equipment can get pretty complex pretty fast, so for this reason commercial screens are equipped with many more types of inputs (SDI, Display port, DVI, VGA, RGBHV and legacy inputs). This allows more connectivity and a vastly reduced possibility of not being able to put vision source to output. It is always a good idea to advise your AV Company of what you intend to use for the source material for your event to avoid issues here.
2) RELIABILITY
Basically commercial machines have been engineered to withstand the elements associated with commercial applications. They are designed to operate 24/7/365 and still maintain optimal temperature & not overheat. This means for you that you won’t have intermittent, or no, picture output over the long term.
3) COMPATIBILITY
Domestic screens will often have trouble interpreting professional video signals. They are have limited resolution options. Commercial screens are designed specifically for compatibility with PC and AV standards in mind.
4) IMAGE PROCESSING
Domestic screens can often taint image quality with gimmicks such as “120Hz Up Scaling” - which in our opinion actually results in a degraded picture.
You can be assured that a commercial grade screen will reproduce the light and colour as faithfully as technology is capable of. We know there isn’t much point spending big bucks on high quality content only to feed it to a cheap screen that can’t reproduce the image as it was intended.
5) IMAGE ADJUSTMENT
Commercial screens house a vastly superior suite of image adjustment and colour correction built into the screen. Your TV at home may have options such as “sports”, “movie”, or “standard” display modes. Commercial screens have individual colour, gamma, backlight, black levels, and many other options, allowing us to showcase the best quality image possible.
6) FLEXIBILITY
Not all installations are the same so with commercial grade screens you have the flexibility of mounting your screen in landscape or portrait orientation, ceiling mount or anything you can imagine. While consumer grade screens are often strictly landscape in application (lest they over heat from poor air flow)
Other mounting options are available with commercial grade screens, such as a video wall capability (our screens use NEC Tilematrix mode).
Public environment settings can be applied when using commercial screens such as locking the use of buttons., which can be surprisingly useful in high traffic flow areas!
7) DURABILITY
Consumer grade screens are often made from plastics and cheaper materials and will not withstand transport or the rigors of event bump-ins and bump-outs. Also connectors in domestic screens may not house the best quality connectors leading to intermittent signal, and connection issues.
Commercial grade equipment is made with much higher quality parts and designed to handle wear and tear – extending the lifespan of the product (and how it looks!).
Now while we have predominantly discussed video display equipment, there is no difference with audio and lighting. A $20,000 audio amplifier will have far superior quality and parts to its consumer grade counterpart $1000 version. You are paying for thousands of dollars worth of Research and Development, better build quality and better components/features.
In a nut shell manufacturers use high quality components and parts in commercial grade equipment, which is why there is such a price difference.
“You get what you pay for” is clearly the case here, with regards to AV gear. Domestic equipment is built to a price point and we have experienced firsthand how this can affect your event. Not the outcome anyone wants.
This means that when you arrive at the event and want to plug your laptop in, play your presentation, have it look amazing, play without interruption and loop seamlessly. You will have a much higher chance of doing this successfully with the commercial grade equipment. Greatly reducing your stress level and allowing you to concentrate on your event not the AV. CVA specializes in providing professional grade video equipment, stocking more commercial specification video screens than any other company. Experience has taught us that no expense should be spared when selecting the right equipment to provide to our clients, as we believe in getting it right first time.