What’s Best For My Control Room: Video Walls or Walls of Video?

By David Jones, Sales Manager Control Room Group

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like everyone dreams of having a “video wall” in their control center. Video walls are great, but they’re not necessarily the correct control room display for everyone.

A Video Wall

One of the first tasks of our sales team is to determine whether the client needs a “video wall” or a “wall of video.”

Although both are powerful tools and have a potential place in the control center, there are big differences between the two. Most customers have never had those differences explained to them. This leads to mistakes in the system design. The client ends up spending money (not “investing”) on unnecessary technology that will never be used properly.

A video wall is made up of a video processor and an array of video displays, (typically video cubes or narrow bezel LCD panels.) The video processor addresses the entire video array just like a CPU addresses a monitor. Users can run multiple applications on the display and open other windows as needed.

A Wall of Video

This setup would come in handy at an energy management center, for example. If there is an outage, it can be managed on a portion of the video wall, without sacrificing the rest of the display.

A wall of video is also composed of an array of video displays; however each display shows the signal from one of multiple inputs. A video matrix switch routes the appropriate input to its corresponding display.

In our illustration of a power outage above, one of the inputs would have to be removed for the energy management center to address the situation on a wall of video.

A wall of video is more appropriate for a security center, for example. Each display would show the signal from one of multiple cameras. If one camera fails, the remaining displays would remain functional.

As we said earlier, both the video wall and wall of video are powerful tools, but each addresses unique control room needs. Many of our clients come to us asking for a video wall when in fact a wall of video fits their requirements best.

If you’d like to learn more about the difference between a video wall and a wall of video, and learn more about how they can benefit you in the control room, please email me at david.jones@avispl.com. I’ll give you all the details.

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