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 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.’
“People would come in with presentations and they just wouldn’t look as good as they could,” said McClelland. “We were requesting that people do their PowerPoint with a dark background, for example.” To remedy that less-than-ideal situation, Christie’s Dave Barletta and Cenero’s Tom McElwee put together a system to manage and control the presentations – including videos, movies, and PowerPoints.
“Sometimes we do classes with other universities where we’ll have one screen with our presentation and another screen with a video conference.” McClelland says, adding that a variety of presentation screen setups can be used now 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.
The Christie Velvet Apex Series is a 4K/60 LED video wall solution with HDR10 compatibility, built-in proprietary Clearview technology, and low-brightness enhancements. System-certified and featuring advanced-monitoring and 24/7 operation, Apex Series is pitched for applications where peak performance is critical.
“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.”
