I just came out of a spirited demo of Da-Lite‘s Affinity line of 1080p video projection screens put on by video producer/projection expert Joe Kane, who asked Da-Lite some time ago to design the Affinity concept in order to allow him to demonstrate what, from his point of view, true 1080p looks like on a big screen when projected by a suitable projector (in this case, Kane’s personal, single-chip, 1080p DLP projector made for him by Samsung) onto a screen unencumbered by the typical impurities that, from Kane’s perspective, ruin the viewing experience. more…

Adam Holladay of Harman‘s System Development and Integration Group was gracious enough to give me a quick demo of the new version (2.0) of Harman HiQNet’s System Architect Software as the show floor was shutting down tonight when the discussion evolved into a larger look at the arrival of, and Harman’s support for, the new AVB (IEEE Audio Video Bridge) audio networking protocol for standardized ethernet, developed by the IEEE 802.1 Audio Video Bridging Task Group–a consortium of engineers from a wide range of major technology companies, including Harman and many other AV players, as well as from other industries. Adam was raving about the concept and the rise of the protocol as having the potential to inexpensively, and seamlessly, become an industry standard ahead of many well known and respected networking protocols already on the landscape, and soon, maybe within a year or two. more…

The growing partnership between Middle Atlantic (booth 5701) and Exact Power (6341) was on display, and educational for me, when Middle Atlantic PR guru Kevin Handerson introduced me to Exact Power’s president/chief engineer/resident genius, Bob Schluter. Bob proceeded to explain the new IsoCenter Isolation Transformer System built by Exact Power, but which will shortly be distributed by Middle Atlantic, and I found myself, for maybe the first time, understanding a little bit about power management, and more importantly, finding it fascinating. more…

As the show madness started easing up, I had time for a nice chat with the always cheery Ron Johnson, director of sales and marketing for Adtec Digital (N6825) this afternoon. After regaling me for a while with tales from the early days of digital signage (“we called our product 13 years ago a multimedia player device, but it was digital signage back before most people knew that term,” Ron said), he spoke with pride about a cool little device from Adtec called mediaHUB HD–a 1080i and 720p encoder that made its InfoComm debut this week.

Ron was particularly pleased that the mediaHUB, checking in at a price point around $12,000, is more than a real-time encoder. It also has a hard drive and can play the role of a scheduling and management server, among other chores. more…