How to Choose the Right Display

Selecting a screen to form the focal point of your meeting room takes careful consideration. The size of your meeting room, the functionality of the space, who will be using the display and how and when … all these points and more will influence your purchase decision.

We have compiled an overview of some of the key questions you need to ask yourself and your team in order to assess your requirements and outlined some helpful information and solutions to help you to make your choice from the huge variety of options available on the display screen market.

The Questions You Need to Ask

When specifying a display, we like to take a 3-part approach to determining the right solution. This is Content, Context and Connectivity.

Content

What will the display be used for?

The type of content on display is what matters here so you need to ascertain whether teams are viewing visuals, slideshows, detailed product specifications, spreadsheets, copy or all of the above and more. If the screen will be used for multiple types of content, then cater to the most detailed, for example spreadsheet analysis, but document them all. This is where we consider, how important is resolution? This comes down to the type of information on display and whether or not the screen will be split for shared collaboration between more than one person at once.

Context

Where is the screen going to be used?

How big is the meeting room in question? How far away are the participants in the meeting?

It isn’t practical to dominate a small huddle room with a huge screen, just as it won’t work to expect a full size meeting room for 20 or more people to function around a single 40-inch display. Find the right balance.

Connectivity

How will people connect to the display to share information?

There are a lot of questions to answer here. Does your company operate a BYOD policy or will people only be able to connect from a PC in the room? How many people will be connecting at once and will they be using Macs, Windows PCs or mobile Android and iOS devices or all of the above? You need to check that the display can cater to all eventualities so work out what the different scenarios might be before you move forward with a purchase.

What You Need to Know

Size

Nearly everyone’s first question when researching a new display for a meeting room is ‘do I really need that 98-inch display screen?’ Well, size is relative, obviously, so a 98-inch screen in a room designed to accommodate 25 directors around a huge table isn’t necessarily going to be that big and it is most likely a valid option for the space and viewing distance. But if you’re looking at a three to five-person, small huddle room then 98 inches of screen may be overkill and depending on the exact size of the space, quite possibly unusable.

We’ve explored the issue of screen size in more detail here but there is a basic rule to keep in mind: Depending on the nature of content on display, the greatest distance a viewer should be away from the screen is no more than four, six, or eight times the height of the image:

• 4x Image Height – ‘Analytical Viewing’
  • Viewers, are fully engaged with the content and can make critical decisions with the ability to analyse details within the displayed image. Content is detailed, fine text, numerical or design/CAD applications.
• 6x Image Height – ‘Basic Viewing’
  • Viewers are actively engaged with the content and can make basic decisions from the displayed image. Content is largely visual – charts, images, video.
• 8x Image Height – ‘Passive Viewing’
  • Viewers are passively engaged with the content and able to recognise what the images are on a screen and understand the general intent of the displayed image.
    

One idea, if you’re looking to work this out before you buy, is to tape the dimensions of the screen as if on the wall, then sit in the seat furthest away from the imaginary screen to get an idea of the size. How does it look? Smaller than you imagined? Bigger?

Quality

As we touched on above, linking multiple screens together is sometimes preferable to investing in one large screen. Firstly, there is a jump in price for the bigger displays due to the relative market volumes and production difficulties. But secondly, even if you take cost out of the equation, you might actually get a better quality picture if you go for multiple smaller screens linked together.

We’ve covered this issue in detail in our guide to screen resolution, but the basic issue with size is that a 98-inch screen displaying Full HD resolution will only display 24 pixels per inch; a 65-inch screen at 4k resolution, meanwhile, will display 67 pixels per inch, offering a 180 per cent increase on the 98-inch screen.

This improvement means a great deal if you’re looking at detailed work on your meeting room display, or if you want to share the screen space between multiple contributors, for example through the Barco ClickShare system.

If your team are screen sharing, especially with detailed data and figures, 4K resolution should be a priority for your meeting room display; substandard resolution can really hamper productivity and the last thing you want is for your new screen to fail to live up to expectations of use.

Function & Collaboration

What are your team actually using the screen for? Is this about passive viewing of video or large visuals? Detailed collaborative work and analysis of data and product specifications? Or perhaps they’re looking at creative development and shared ideas?

If you’re catering for creativity and ideas development, you might want to consider a touchscreen display. Teams are often highly motivated when it comes to dealing with fast paced, demanding tasks such as processing client feedback or working with imaginative briefs in real-time collaboration. If your meeting room technology can’t keep up with people’s enthusiasm, you have a problem. But supply the tools to not only facilitate but accelerate these quickly evolving projects, and you’ll be on to a real boost in productivity.

Touchscreens are a great option here, enabling multiple team members to jump in and contribute with intuitive functionality.

To summarise, there is no single ‘best’ meeting room display screen; essentially, if you want to choose the right display for your meeting room, you need to ask yourself and your teams the right questions. Identify the right requirements, size, quality of image and connectivity options that you need, and you’ll be looking at products that match up to your unique set of circumstances.