Pacific Media Associates (PMA) have released their findings on the roles of front projectors and large flat panel displays in organizations.
This is the third set of important results from their sixth biennial (on the odd years) large-scale (1000 responses) and statistically-representative survey of United States users and intenders of front projectors, both individual consumers and organizations.
The survey focused on topics of timely interest, including requests for additional or modified questions from PMA’s extensive client base of front projector manufacturers. For several years PMA's biennial (on the even years) Dealer Survey has documented the growing role of flat panel displays in meeting rooms. This year PMA added several questions to their 2011 End User Survey to probe this role in greater detail.
Projectors are still the dominant large-screen display within all meeting rooms, according to the survey. And end users expect projectors to retain their leading position next year too. However, an increasing number of two-display configurations with projectors and flat panels as well as flat-panel-only configurations are appearing in certain types of meeting rooms.
“As flat panel displays have gotten bigger, better, and cheaper, they have increasingly competed with projectors for use in meeting rooms. We learned from our survey respondents why they are attractive, though projector makers may wince at some of the answers,” said Dr. William Coggshall, president of PMA. “We found that flat panel displays large enough to serve "small" meeting rooms (which we define as those holding 10 or fewer people) are now cheap enough to compete with projectors. And that considerable numbers of flat panel displays are chosen either because of ambient light considerations or because they are to be used in a video-conferencing system.”