Christie Looks to Lead the Way in AV Innovation

At InfoComm in Las Vegas, Nevada last week MarketScale caught up with Richard Derbyshire, a Consultant Relations Manager at Christie. Christie is a global visual, audio and collaboration solutions company offering diverse solutions for business, entertainment, and industry.

Derbyshire’s role is assisting the design consulting community with identifying product and technology solutions for their project applications. When we asked Mr. Derbyshire about the new products Christie is pushing out this year, he said the company currently has a lot going on. 

Laser Phosphor Technology

“There’s been enormous growth in laser phosphor projection technology. Laser phosphor technology has been around for a number of years, mostly in the under 10,000 lumen brightness category,” Derbyshire said. “Over the last 18 months, this has lept up to 15 to 18 to 20,000 lumens of brightness, in both the single chip environment and also in the 3-chip display environment.” 

Image Processing

According to Derbyshire, “We introduced last year and continue to roll out our Spyder X80 which is the largest digital canvas—80 million pixels—for forming images through a variety of input/output configurations.” The Christie Spyder allows users to design, create and present uncompromised content on any type or mix of displays in the most innovative ways possible. 

SDVoE Technology Solutions

Terra is an all-new AV solution enabling the transport, processing and control of audiovisual content, including 4K@60Hz video formats, over 10G Ethernet networks providing uncompressed, zero-frame latency, artifact-free video over readily available and affordable 10G components. “As one of the founding members of SDVoE, being able to see so many other manufacturers join on, we see the push to 4K really comes to the fore which is why you see so many more, even single chip projectors, in 4K capability,” said Mr. Derbyshire. 

LED

Derbyshire maintained, “Christie has been designing and fabricating LED now for several years. We believe we come to the market with some very strong offerings in the narrow pixel pitch—from 0.96 to 4mm, in very accessible front access service cabinets. So, we think we have a very strong offering in LED competing with many of the other manufacturers out here.” 

Pandora’s Box

Derbyshire went on to say, “Another flagship product for us is Pandora’s Box which is an image processing device, a content server, shell control device, image processor, warp engine, rendering engine—it’s a swiss army utility knife to make video systems operate.” It is a suite of products combining a full feature software set with the flexibility and reliability of a powerful hardware platform designed for maximum creative results.

What’s Next?

When MarketScale asked what sectors are showing the most growth in this industry, Mr. Derbyshire replied, “I’ve seen a continued migration toward higher resolution, higher brightness, across all sectors. We’re seeing greater adoption of direct view LED in places where it has traditionally been projection, so auditoriums and corporate boardrooms, even some large spaces in higher education have gone to direct view LED. As cost comes down in those product areas and the performance increases, that’s to be expected.” Mr. Derbyshire further commented, “We’ve also seen a lot of growth in deployment of flat panel displays. Flat panels are just growing leaps and bounds everywhere. We’re starting to feel the push back against mullions in tiled flat panel displays leading us further into more LED. So, LED is going to have a very strong presence in the market for some time to come.”