Featured Project: NEC Display’s Video Wall Transforms Retail Drones Display

Chicago-based NEC Display Solutions, a provider of commercial LCD displays and monitors as well as digital and multimedia projectors, announces a recent project that it did for B&H Photo Video.

B&H has a stand-alone, 70,000-square-foot store in the heart of Manhattan, New York City, that gets an average of 5,000 people through it a day. At any given time it has approximately 10,000 items on display.

According to NEC, B&H wanted to create a special display for its drones’ inventory. Drones-unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs-have become immensely popular for photographers, both professional and amateur, because they have so many uses and applications.

“The drone area isn’t a big part of the store, but it gets a lot of traffic because of the excitement around the technology,” says Yitzie Schwartz, training manager at B&H. “People hear a drone being flown and they gravitate toward the area.”

Previously, the in-store UAV department consisted only of a roped-off “cage” where sales people could fly the drones securely and demonstrate their different capabilities to customers. The cage was obviously not the best way to show photographers and videographers just what the drones were capable of, however.

When it decided to upgrade the drones display, Schwartz says the store initially planned to display static graphics like large posters of aerial images taken by the drones, but she thought they could do better.

“We needed to be able to open our customers’ eyes to these drones’ capabilities and show them the larger-than-life aerial footage,” Schwartz said. “That’s when we had the idea: Why don’t we gather footage of what these drones can do, and put it on a big screen in the store?”

So, the company decided to put in a video wall and, after looking at two different vendors, chose NEC Display.

“NEC has an entire plug-and-play video wall kit, and that was a big part of the decision for us,” Schwartz said. “The package comes with everything in it, including mounts, cables and the monitors.”

B&H chose a video wall in a 2×2 configuration using four NEC X464UNS-2s bundled together, with this display model specifically chosen because of its high brightness and very thin bezel, Schwartz said.

“There is so much more we can do with a video wall-between showing actual video from the drones and ways to customize content and make it interactive,” Schwartz added. “We wanted a way to let customers view different footage based on what kind of drone they are looking to purchase to help them choose the right one.”