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.
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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,” McClelland said. “We were requesting that people, especially outside presenters, that were coming in, if they could do PowerPoint with a dark background, for example.”
To remedy this less-than-ideal situation, Christie’s Dave Barletta and Cenero’s Tom McElwee recommended 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 said 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,” McElwee said. “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,” McClelland said. “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.”
