Presentation systems come of age: with lower prices and better technology, colleges are using plasma screens, lightweight projectors and high-tech whiteboards to change the way classes look

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, Sept, 2001 by Mark Seavy

At an ever-quickening pace, universities and colleges are becoming proving ground for display technologies.

Huge lecture halls are home to high-tech LCD projectors, while plasma display panels can be found in nearby hallways where they are frequently used to provide up-to-the-minute information on class schedules.

With substantial budgets for audio/video equipment, many colleges and universities can afford products such as plasma screens--whose price tags can soar above $10,000 for a single panel--and many are taking advantage of it.

"I plan to use [plasma screens] to enhance team learning so that students using the new display technology can have multiple computers hooked up to them," says Ann DeMarle-Pollak, a multimedia and graphics professor at Champlain College in Burlington, Vt., which offers courses in e-commerce, Internet technology. "Then they could work on a project or a Web site together."

Cost Considerations

The potential for team learning and the high-resolution images that can be displayed on the plasma screens has made the technology especially attractive to colleges and universities. Most are larger than 40 inches and can go as high as 63 inches, such as the new screen that Samsung began shipping this summer at $29,000.

On the lower end, more than a half-dozen companies sell 42-inch panels, and Fujitsu recently introducing a model with 800 x 600-pixel resolution (SVGA) at $5,999. To fund the purchases, universities and colleges will use internal funds as private money and donations, industry officials said.

Besides the price, a key selling points for many schools is the unit's brightness and contrast ratio. Many of these screens offer a minimum of 300 lumens brightness and often more. New panels from Fujitsu and Panasonic boast a rating of 550 lumens.

Contrast ratio often starts in the 200:1 or 300:1 range, but rapidly increases with the larger sizes.

"There's no sticker shocker at colleges and universities for plasma," says Andrew Fliss, a vice president at Samsung, noting that many schools are shifting from similarly sized and priced 40- to 50-inch rear projection monitors containing three cathode ray tubes to plasma.

A key selling point for plasma also has been the much shallower depth of the panels, which require far less space than a standard rear projection monitor does. A standard plasma screen is typically to two to three inches deep, while a CRT-based monitor is usually 25 inches or more. The shallower depth also mixes with plasma's ability to be hung on the wall like a framed picture, thus making them ideal for information displays that were first found at airports, but now are working their way into higher education.

Two areas that have nagged plasma screens--power consumption and the noise generated by the fan required to cool the panels--are also gradually being addressed. For example, Pioneer recently introduced a 50-inch wide screen panel (at $15,999) that draws 400 watts, down from 480 watts. Meanwhile, Fujitsu is promising a 32-inch screen that uses newly developed low voltage drivers to drop power consumption into the 200-watt range and eliminate the need for a fan.

"I'm not sure that big screen plasma will ever take off in the living room because there will be so many other technologies competing in that space," says Joshua Kairoff, a senior field engineer at Pioneer. "But for industrial applications, including colleges and universities, where the feature demands require a more robust display, these will succeed."

Smaller, Lighter, Brighter

As these screens replace CRT-based monitors, so will LCD projectors replace similarly featured units in the lecture halls. The process has been slow--most schools upgrade their projection equipment every five to six years--but a sharp drop in prices brought on by a glut of front projectors may quicken the pace. Prices have dropped 10 percent in each of the first two quarters this year bringing the entry-level models into the $2,000 range.

Most schools are shopping for projectors with 1,500 to 2,000 lumens brightness, 350:1 contrast ratio and a minimum resolution of 800 x 600 pixels, industry officials say. The resolution of the projectors depends largely on the resolution of notebook computers, which professors are increasingly using to deliver lectures, industry officials add.

Front projectors have also eased their way into classrooms by delivering smaller sized models that weigh less than to pounds. To achieve the smaller size, some projectors are employing LCDs as well as a technology developed by Texas Instruments called Digital Light Processing that can be delivered using microdisplay panels that measure less than one-inch diagonally. Projectors using TI's DLP technology typically contain either One or three panels, the former of which has enabled the weight of some models to drop below five pounds and trump LCDs, which have yet to accomplish that feat. The other specifications are roughly the same as LCDs including 1,000 lumens or more brightness, 200:1 contrast ratio and 1,024 x 768 or more pixel resolution. JVC markets a rival technology dubbed Direct-Drive Image Light Amplifier while other companies are backing liquid crystal on-silicon, both of which have many of the same features as DLP and are based on a microdisplay that is less than one-inch diagonally.