It depends on what kind of impression you want to make on your customers and how much potential trouble you are willing to experience in your store. Most retailers, banks, restaurants and public buildings go to great lengths to design an environment attractive to customers. Digital signage is a new marketing tool coming into the scene and creating a lot of buzz but it should also enhance the look of your store as it delivers your message.
The most common applications are digital posters or menus; but is buying a TV a good idea for an application like this? If you clicked the links, you saw that the digital poster or menu is a combination of a commercial LCD screen, a media player that creates the program for the screen and a wall mount to install it in your store. The commercial LCDs that are included in our signage packages are discounted at prices that favorably compete with TVs but are technically far superior for signage.
Commercial LCDs are designed for continuous use, can be used in portrait orientation, are 700 NIT which is twice as bright as a TV and look good with a clean ¾ inch bezel. Commercial LCDs also have technical attributes designed for signage that TVs don’t have. Some people however think they can save a lot of money by using a TV instead of a commercial LCD.
Using April 2011 prices from Costco.com as a guide for low prices on TVs, I found you can pay as little as $500 to as high as $720 for a 42 inch LCD TV depending on features and quality. If you decided to buy the TV from Costco instead of the commercial screen in our signage package you would save $240 in total if you bought the $720 Costco TV; and you would save $460 if the bought the lowest price Costco TV. So what do we risk, or give up, for the savings?
TVs are not warranted for continuous use in a commercial application so if it fails you will need to replace it. Commercial LCDs have a two year on-site warranty. Brightness is very important as most commercial buildings are well lit or have daylight coming in through large windows and doors like this example. The link shows a 700 NIT screen. If it was half as bright like a typical TV, it would be washed out next to the daylight streaming from the door. It would not be able to be mounted in portrait orientation either which is far superior for good signage.
TVs primary function is television shows, and while it has many inputs to connect different devices , the primary input that the TV will display when turned on is the TV tuner. The cheaper the TV, the more confident you can be that this is the case. A commercial LCD also has many inputs but has circuits that allow you to set the primary input to the media player so your signage is the default program displayed on the screen. Some TVs also have this feature but you need to look for it otherwise if the power is turned off or if a power surge resets the input, someone will need to find the remote control and flip through the TV’s inputs to get back to the media player.
As in anything, you get what you pay for, but in the case of digital signage you don’t have to pay much more to go from a TV to a full featured commercial product when you buy a package from tjg Technical Signs.
