Kramer Electronics

Kramer Electronics manufactures and sells high quality and high technology products
for video, audio and computer graphics video signal distribution, routing, processing
and interfacing.
Author: Clint Hoffman, Kramer Vice President of Marketing choffman@kramerus.com

A Time of Digital Transition

There is a popular phrase which says “We live in interesting times.”  It is supposed to be based on an ancient Chinese curse that actually says, “May he live in interesting times.”

Around the world our core markets, no matter how you refer to them, are going through significant changes.  They are going through digital changes.  In our business at this time, we do in fact live in interesting times.

There are changes in technology.  We are moving more and more rapidly to the digital age.  The vocabulary in our business these days is littered with terms like DVI, FireWire HDCP and HDMI.  Our displays have already all been converted over to digital with technologies like plasma, direct view LCD and projection display systems based on LCD, LCOS and DLP.  It seems to be an “attack of the acronyms”, but it’s really just the world we now live in.

There are changes in the systems we design and sell. The heart of all our systems and the technology that enabled us to design and sell systems in the first place is the control technology.  Our control technology is changing with remarkable speed.  Simple integrated media and room control bundles such as Kramer’s SummitView™ System are becoming more and more the mainstream in today’s training, conference and presentation rooms.  Simplified control is now available to a much greater cross section of the market, including both ProAV and residential applications.

How we move our signals over long distances is changing also.  Instead of bulky and expensive high quality BNC cables being pulled through conduit and walls, we are migrating in many applications to using the inexpensive CAT 5 type twisted pair cable.  This is the same type of cable that our networks rely on.  We even have specialized “video use” versions of these twisted pair cables.  We can now transmit our high resolution signals over great distances with high quality results with products like Kramer’s Cobra™ CAT 5 type twisted pair transmitters, receivers, matrix switchers and distribution products.  Kramer’s Cobra products are capable of sending 1920x1200 pixel resolution signals 1300 feet with remarkable ease.  They are also flexible enough to easily create localized “AV Networks” with several sources and several displays integrated over a large distance in a facility.

Perhaps most of all, there are changes in how our displays interact with our sources, both in the kinds of signals that we send and how our new world of fixed resolution displays reacts to incoming signals.

More and more we use HDMI and DVI signals with HDCP encryption and EDID data rather than RGBHV or composite video signals.  These “digital” signals give us the benefit of a “handshake” through the EDID data.  They also give us the headache of handshaking.  On the surface, the communication between source and display to determine the best resolution signal to send to the display to match its native resolution is great.  In the real world, it makes signal management a challenge.  Kramer’s HDMI distribution amplifier and matrix switching products such as the VM-1616HDMI and VS-66HDMI utilize our enhanced Smart EDID technology that allows the capture of the EDID information from a display connected to the unit so that it can be stored and recalled from non-volatile memory.

The digital age of AV has also brought us the joy of scaling because every display we use has a fixed or native resolution and all incoming signals that don’t match that resolution need to be scaled to it.  Scaling is necessary in everything we do these days and it can be a good thing, if done right.  If not, our picture quality suffers greatly.

LCD and plasma monitors, along with projectors, were not intended to be scaling and/or switching devices.  They were intended primarily to simply display the material.  There is too much price competition on these display products to put high quality scaling components in them.  And, we send so many different kinds of signals to our displays, many times with different aspect ratios, that we need to do something in our systems to ensure reliable and consistent performance.  We need to consider the use of external seamless switchers and scaler/switchers wherever possible. 

At the same time, these seamless switchers and scaler/switchers can improve our life by simplifying our connectivity.  With these products, we can use one cable to run all the signals to the projector or monitor.  This simplifies our systems.  We can also ensure that no matter what the original signal resolution is, we always send the best possible signal to the projector or monitor and thereby bypass the display’s internal scaler and enhance our image quality.  Finally, we can also handle the switching externally.  Gone will be the glitches or messages that pop up while the display re-establishes the sync for the new source.

How do we do all of this?   We can accomplish this through the use of products like Kramer’s VP-727xl In-CTRL™ seamless switcher and the rest of our Kramer ProScale™ digital scaler/switchers.  Scaler switchers and seamless switchers should be integral parts of nearly every system design in today’s market place.

In today’s world we have simple integrated media and room control systems, long distance video transmission over CAT 5 type cable, HDMI and DVI digital signal management products and seamless switchers and scaler/switchers. 

These are indeed interesting times and we can thank the transition from analog to digital.  And you can count on Kramer to provide you with the solutions you need to be well connected in this digital world.

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