A Wider Net

I was catching weird looks as I shot these pictures of the signs that labeled the real products on display. There were others like me, according to at least one exhibitor, who had the same question I did: “Are these for sale?” Having seen them at Infocomm in one or two booths, and having been told “no, we’re not selling them”, I was pretty anxious to hear a “yes”.
After a couple of “no”’s, I started to feel for the exhibitors. It must be maddening to have the world’s largest plasma screen on display when some gadget freak asks “how much for this little 7″ LCD screen that you’re using as a digital sign for the ginormous plasma?” But truthfully, bigger isn’t always better.

All of the major manufacturers of plasmas and LCD’s build their own little digital signs to use next to each product. In most cases, they merely replaced a foam core sign. In some cases, the sign played two or more pages of information in a loop. In all cases, they were bright, crisp, field-programmable signs and they ROCK for exhibits.

Some only take SD cards as input for their images. Others received their signals via wired ethernet connection, and still others were got their information via WiFi Wireless.

Oddly, only half of the makers of these displays actually sell them. They sell digital photo frames (god, it seemed like a hundred exhibitors make them now) but they didn’t sell these - the nice ones next to each product. Philips is selling really nice wired units with replaceable magnetic frames. I think we’ll be seeing a lot of these in the higher-end exhibits as mini-digital signs. Be cautious about over-using their slide show capabilities. If you replace a convenient at-a-glance sign with a “show”, you’ll slow your booth throughput to a crawl. Use these as attractive easy-to-read field-programmable displays, but stay away from multiple pages as much as possible and stay away from pages that have no content, like empty logo or branding slides.

At around $150-250 apiece, this is affordable digital signage for each major product - just be sure that the product is cooler.