Widescreen Annotation: 3 Failures and a Success

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Widescreen Annotation: 3 Failures and a Success

10/18/2005

By Will Craig

A client recently asked me to specify an annotation system for their presentation system. "Make it easy to use, but with lots of functions. Make it high quality, with maximum flexibility, but it needs to be small. It needs to handle any possible input source: dedicated PC, user-provided laptop of any native resolution including DVI-D, VCR/DVD player, document camera, digital camera, camcorder, codec. Insert thoughtful pause here. "But not too expensive. Oh! And make it widescreen-capable."

My "Wider Perspective" column in this month's Campus Technology touches on the rapid changes happening in the digital display realm, both in terms of widescreen and in terms of the new signals campus technologists are being asked to integrate (DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI).

This case study should serve as both a cautionary tale and as a hopeful one. Every manufacturer and manufacturer's representative we have said something like this: "Hmm -I don't know. Let us know what you find out."

Plan A was to look at the usual suspects in the annotation monitor realm. Products such as the Smart Technologies Sympodium ID250 and DT770 offer a wealth of features handy for educators, especially those concerned with recording annotation information for sharing over a network and distance learning applications. Unfortunately, a site visit at a Sympodium-equipped site yielded the same result that a call to tech support confirmed--that when my 1440x900 native resolution Dell widescreen laptop was plugged into the presentation system connected to the Sympodium, the Sympodium blanked out. All the other monitors in the room displayed the widescreen image, but the Sympodium did not.

A further note on Smart Technologies: while they may be behind the curve on wide screen, they are doing some very interesting things with room control. Higher education technologists and control system manufacturers take note: when a user can control their room's AV system by triggering events directly through the Smart Technologies' software, using a Smart Board or Sympodium interface, and can monitor AV system status over the network, then the higher education user no longer needs an expensive AMX, Crestron, or Extron system whose only function is monitoring and control.

We did not look at other software-driven products from other manufacturers for two reasons: first, many use SXGA 17-inch and 19-inch monitors that are not widescreen-capable, and second, the wide variety of possible sources, signal types and aspect ratios meant that simplicity and flexibility-the two most important goals-were not likely to be achieved.

Plan B was to look at Crestron's UPX-2 solution. At a list price of $19,600 for the top-of-the-line UPX-2+ with 18-inch dual-touch monitor, it threatened to break the budget. But, with the capability of using the annotation panel both as a control touch screen and an annotation preview, with multiple source preview windows, and the word "Universal" is right there in the title… surely this must be silver bullet?

To Crestron's credit, they admitted upfront that widescreen images do not look good on their system. Back to the drawing board…