A Christie Apex Series LED video wall and the Spyder X80 manage and control the presentations in the school’s primary guest speaker center
The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication recently replaced its aging legacy Christie rear projection wall and Spyder X20 with the Christie Spyder X80 and a Christie Velvet Apex Series video wall in Room 500 – the school’s primary presentation center for speakers and guests.
Phil McClelland, the school’s classroom technology manager, said a new wall was needed that showed presentations better plus a more powerful processor with greater capabilities. The new LED wall also means no more bezels that can distract, and brighter, richer colors that ‘pop.’
“All these people would come in with presentations and they just wouldn’t look as good as they could,” said McClelland. “We were requesting that people, especially outside presenters, that were coming in, if they could do PowerPoint with a dark background, for example.”
With that less than ideal situation, enter Christie’s Dave Barletta and Cenero’s Tom McElwee to recommend a Christie Apex Series LED video wall and the Spyder X80 to manage and control the presentations – which includes videos, movies, and numerous PowerPoint presentations, that are now displaying with fare greater clarity and richer colors than with the previous setup.
“Sometimes we do classes with other universities where we’ll have one screen with our presentation and another screen with a video conference. That’s how we have it set up.” McClelland says a variety of screen setups can be used now – depending on the needs of the presentation – with the Spyder X80 providing a greater variety of possibilities.
“We made sure to take into consideration the ways the room was going to be used, the needs of the faculty, students and presenters and then put together a solution that would not only work well for the various requirements but would also display an excellent visual,” said McElwee. “This delivered a strong impact with the new technology allowing for a better overall experience, improving video calls, presentations and collaborative interactions in the space.”
“We get a lot of compliments now about how good the wall looks,” added McClelland. “We were looking forward to doing this and the LED shows the content very well – much better than what we had before. And since we have the Apex wall with higher resolution capabilities, we wanted to be able to have a more powerful video processor – the Spyder X80 – for those visuals.”
The Christie Velvet Apex Series is a premium LED video wall solution delivering 4K at 60Hz resolution, HDR10 compatibility, built-in Clearview technology, and low-brightness enhancements for impactful visual experiences. System-certified and featuring advanced-monitoring and 24/7 operation, Apex Series is ideal for applications where peak performance is critical.
Featuring processing and connectivity capabilities surpassing anything else in the market, the Spyder X80 is the most powerful multi-screen windowing processor and content management solution available – capable of delivering up to 80 million pixels across multiple displays.