7 Things to Keep in Mind When Buying an LED Video Wall for Your Control Room or ICCC

LED control rooms are no longer a novelty. All major companies invested in property management, logistics, or security, are now investing in functional control rooms. In contrast, sensors and IoT devices will someday reduce the need for physical inspection. But, as the business processes require manual work done in a concentrated location, control rooms will have value to offer.

Control rooms act as the necessary buffer between your security team and the on-ground operations. An effective control room can save your company from incurring:

1. Damage and repair costs.
2. Quality control costs.
3. Security breach liabilities.
4. Penalties attached with breach of hygiene standards.
5. Cost of collecting insurance remunerations.

Each of these benefits plays a critical role to derisk your operation. To get this multidirectional impact, your control room must be running on the right LED video wall. And here is how you can choose one.

The 7 Factors for an Effective Control Room LED Video Wall

You cannot take a cookie-cutter approach to orchestrate your control room. And that is the reason why no particular set of video wall solutions can give an edge to every control room. Based on your industry, budget, and inherent functionalities of the control room, you will need a unique set of LED wall screens.

However, there are some fundamental properties you can look for to ensure that the LED Display in the control room delivers to your expectations.

1. Usable Life

The usable life of your LED screens will dictate how frequently you have to change the screens across your control rooms. Changing one screen in your control room has several levels of factors:

1. The cost of the new screen.
2. The cost of uninstalling the old screen and installing the new screen.
3. The lead time for changing screens can often result in several hours or days of downtime for your security team in the control room.

To tilt the economics in your favour, focus on LED displays that can last for a few years. For instance, XTREME Media’s screens are covered with a first-in-the-industry seven-year warranty. This means that you can have the same module of screens for seven years without incurring additional operational costs or witnessing control room downtime.

2. Power Consumption

Even if you have a small control room, you should expect this to be one of the most power-consuming areas in your facilities other than the manufacturing floor. Most control rooms have exorbitant operating costs because they are running 24 x 7. The screens, dashboards, and security systems have to work in sync and keep running for the entire year.

Consistently running security systems and control rooms consume more power than a typical office room. On top of that, as the control room LED display ages, its power consumption will only increase.

Hence, if you want a cost-effective control room, it is essential to filter the LED screens based on their power consumption trends. We understand the economics of control room power consumption and have worked on our GreenTech-backed LED modules, which are 50% more energy-efficient than the conventional LED screen.

3. Cooling Needs

Alongside the power consumption data, the efficiency of your LED video wall will also depend on the in-built or available cooling system it carries. Any device that is running around the clock will require an efficient cooling system. Without one, you would end up putting your control room & command centre team at risk and pay more than your usual energy bill.

Thus, your LED screen manufacturer or supplier must be able to provide you with the exact cooling needs of the display module at the time of sale or offer presentation.

4. Performance Consistency or Redundancy

Now that we have established the cost of running a 24 x 7 control room, we must answer the question – can an LED video wall provide the same performance for every frame? The simple answer is – yes, but it depends on the quality of the screen.

Whenever you run a device for more than a few hours at a stretch, you might encounter unanticipated performance issues. Dead pixels, lagging picture quality, and overheated LED modules are just some anomalies associated with conventional LED screens.

Our team was obsessed with delivering consistent performance across every LED module when designing the XTREME Media proprietary Vigilant IoT Technology. Most issues that arise with continuous use of the LED screens can be resolved in time and without incurring any substantial costs – as far as they are detected in time.

Vigilant delivers a consistent stream of data to our 24 x 7 support team. This way, every screen is monitored in isolation and the context of the control room. Every granular anomaly in screen performance is both recorded and flagged. This way, your team will always be a step ahead of even the most unexpected performance challenges with our team of experts available around the clock.

5. Pixel Pitch

Suppose your control room or command centre team monitors your operations in tricky situations with several moving objects, changing light settings, and vibrant colours. In that case, it will need a better pixel pitch.

Pixel pitch is the distance between two pixels, which determines the quality of the overall picture. The closer the pixels, the better the picture quality because the more pixels can be fit into a square metre or feet of space.

To ensure robust picture quality, XTREME Media screens come with an industry-leading pixel pitch of 0.6 mm. This pixel pitch measure for our LED Display for the control room gives operators all the visual data they need to perform their job without a hiccup.

6. Adaptability

If your control room covers a comprehensive topology of locations, one range of screens will not be sufficient to capture each granular detail. Your team will need an LED video wall that can effectively make each minute detail distinguishable. And this can be achieved only if the screen has been optimized for high colour depth, contrast ratios, and grayscale.

XTREME Media’s video wall solutions carry a contrast ratio of 20,000:1 and 22-bit colour depth powered by TrueColour. To put that in context, the average contrast ratio of an LED TV is approximately 4,000:1 with a colour depth of 8 to 16-bit.

7. Connectivity

The final frontier for performance is – how do your LED screens get connected to a central processing system? If you plan to use wires, you would be exposing your control room team to increased downtime during maintenance and possible safety risks while the control room is functional.

XTREME Media screens come with the capabilities for WiFi-enable one-click mirroring. This way, your LED video wall will be one click away from being connected to a computing system, saving countless minutes that get wasted in plugging and unplugging screens.

In Conclusion

Your control room will be the primary layer of defence against security, safety, and operational risks. While running a 24 x 7 control room comes with its benefits, it also has its challenges. XTREME Media’s control room video wall solutions deliver industry-leading usable life, consistent performance, energy efficiency, around the clock expert-led support, and better picture quality.