Trusted Technology on Tour

This month our team visited the world’s largest custom integration trade show Integrated Systems Europe or ISE for short over in Amsterdam to find out what’s new in our industry from the leading manufacturer’s in the world.

It was great to catch up with so many friends in our industry and look at the new and exciting technology in the integrated technology arena, this was our fifth show in a row at the sprawling RAI exhibition centre and the penultimate one before it moves to its bigger home in Barcelona in 2021.

We could probably create a website on the technology however below are the takeaways from our teams perspective.

• Micro LED panels from a variety of brands were on display, micro LED is the first new panel technology since OLED launched some 10 years ago. Micro LED allows us to create enormous images in 8K resolution – our favourite on display was certainly the 12m yes 12 metre x 7 metre Sony Crystal LED which was stunning.

• Control4’s purchase of NEEO was a big surprise in our industry. NEEO based in Switzerland have an amazing team of designers and their remote control launched a couple of years ago was one of the sleekest on the market. We believe this acquisition gives Control4 the ability to create even slicker designs for their interface products including light switches, touchscreens and remote controls. We believe this is a really smart move for Control4 and look forward to seeing the new interfaces hopefully before the end of the year.

• HDMI over IP which allows for HDMI sources from for example an Apple TV box to be sent over structured cabling to many TV screens, whilst this technology has been around for a few years more and more manufacturers are beginning to get on board with the technology. Primarily due to flexibility as previously with traditional HDMI matrices the client was forced to have the same number of HDMI inputs as HDMI outputs, so if the client had 16 TV screens that they wanted to send signals from 4 Sky Receivers they were forced to buy a 16×16 HDMI matrix whereas HDMI over IP could give 1 HDMI source to 100 TV locations or vice versa. In our own world we see the number of TV’s in a home go as high as 20-30 when you consider bathroom TV’s and Cinema Rooms so do see HDMI over IP technology overtaking HDMI matrices in the coming years.

• BOSE for us had the best presentation which was something Steve Jobs would have been proud of, their new range of products is truly stunning and how they get so much sound in something so small is incredible – I guess that’s why they invest billions in research and development each year.

• Future Automation which for us is the standard when it comes to motorised brackets and lifts had some new and exciting products which will allow to be even more imaginative when it comes to hiding TV screens for our clients. A lot of the interior designers we work with hate technology spoiling their clean line design and rightly so. With the Future Automation products we can offer Architects, Designers and most importantly Home Owners even more ways of hiding those TV screens.

• Cinema Rooms are traditionally difficult to recreate in the busy RAI centre as nearly 80,000 visitors pass through the event over the 4 days however we did experience some amazing rooms with some of our friends at BARCO, Trinnov, Meridian, Anthem and Procella. Every room had the movie player of choice from Kaleidescape with Bohemian Rhapsody really sounding great in the rooms.

For us there is nothing that achieves escapism better than a dedicated Cinema Room and we couldn’t wait to come back and build even more of them for our clients.

All in all the trip was extremely beneficial and we came away even more excited to deliver our Experience Amazing promise for clients.