28 01732 759725 ISE 2023 attention and provide more impactful experiences. “It’s difficult to find an audio solution for LED screens because traditionally you'd have audio coming from behind the screen. These line array speakers allow you to completely control the beam of sound so that you can angle it to suit the installation and the desired listening environment. Having an audio solution for an LED is quite unique and what we’ve noticed from having it at the front of the stand is that 99% of people walking past, hear the audio and stop and watch. It helps capture their attention.” Sony’s Crystal LED displays have numerous applications, from eyecatching centrepieces in reception areas and boardroom installations for viewing Excel and PowerPoint in minute detail to more immersive deployments in retail and virtual production installations, where the display can act as a virtual backdrop for content creation. Virtual production Elsewhere on the stand, Sony was demonstrating its Crystal LED Virtual Production System Solution, comprising a 137in Crystal LED B-series display and VENICE cinema camera, alongside a camera tracking system and real-time engine. “It’s technically a complete Sony ecosystem,” explained Dover. “Colours on the display are identical to how they look on Sony BVM post-production colour grading monitors because Sony has that understanding of how to process images correctly and accurately on screen. We call it ‘from lens to living room’. In the US, it’s ‘from camera to couch’. It gives customers reassurance that they can trust the brand.” He added that virtual production/post-production is a big growth area for Sony. “We just did an installation in France with an LED wall 19 metres wide by 8 metres high. The studio leases out the space so brands can film whatever they need to, without having to travel to a location and incur the cost of moving people and equipment around.” Bread and butter In enterprise AV, Sony is best known for its Bravia brand of professional displays – another big growth area. Dover describes them as Sony’s ‘bread and butter’ and estimates that they now outsell the company’s projectors by a ratio of more than 2:1. “In B2B, probably 65% to 70% of sales come from Bravia panels. Projection was always the go-to because you could get really big image sizes and flexible installations, but now panel sizes are getting ever bigger, the cost is coming down quite substantially and you have much more flexibility when it comes to the installation of larger panel sizes.” That aside, Dover points out that projector sales have been relatively stable over the last few years and, more than 50 years after Sony entered the projection market, remain a big part of the company’s business. “In education, projection is key. You're not going to put an LED wall in a lecture theatre because of the price, whereas projectors are a really cost-effective way to get that big screen solution. Small meeting rooms are making the transition to screens, but larger meeting rooms are still wedded to projection because of the size and brightness that’s required in such environments.” Comprehensive line-up Returning to the subject of Bravia displays, Dover cited the breadth The brightest and the best The design of Sony’s stand at ISE paid homage to sustainability and the company’s Japanese heritage with an organic paper and wood aesthetic, but it was the company’s new displays, production studio and industry partnerships that caught the eye. We started our tour with Sony’s new Crystal LED displays – the BH Series (optimised for brightness) and the CH Series (optimised for contrast). These super-bright modular LED panels, available with a pixel pitch of 1.2 or 1.5mm, provide the building blocks of LED video walls that can be expanded to create the super-size, immersive experiences that were such a feature of ISE 2023. Dover highlighted the panels’ energy-efficiency, modularity, configurability and serviceability. “This is a modular system – it is made up tile by tile – and it is completely configurable, so you can adjust individual elements of each tile. The beauty of this is that it enables us to cross-match supply. Typically, with LED, if you wanted to extend your display at any point you would use panels from the same production batch to get the required level of accuracy. Because we can colour calibrate these panels to match a display exactly, you can use panels from a completely different batch to the original, which reduces the need to hold additional modules as spares.” Sony’s BH and CH Series are also surface-mountable and frontserviceable, and panels can be replaced without having to turn off or reboot the display. The model showcased by Sony was a 220in BH-series 4K 1.2mm Crystal LED display enhanced with LA1 line array speakers – four speakers on either side and six above the display – which Dover says helps organisations attract A stand tour with Adam Dover, Trade & Segment Marketing Manager at Sony Europe, provided an opportunity to learn about trends in the AV market through the prism of Sony’s product portfolio. James Goulding reports Adam Dover Having an audio solution for an LED is quite unique and what we’ve noticed from having it at the front of the stand is that 99% of people walking past, hear the audio and stop and watch
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