Hutchinson Metro Center Atrium Complex

Clarity Matrix Video Wall Provides Entertainment and Advertising Platform in New Multi-use Office, Retail and Lodging Complex

The East Bronx area of New York City is in the midst of rapid development that is being paced by commercial properties such as the Hutchinson Metro Center Complex, a mixed-use campus on the Hutchinson River Parkway. Planar, along with system integration and digital media design and development partners, is meeting the need for advanced communication technology in the new complex, providing a large-scale video wall for the lobby that helps attract new tenants, provides an entertainment source in the building's common space, as well as an advertising platform for the developer, commercial tenants in the building and nearby businesses.

The video wall, a four-by-four (4x4) array of Planar's Clarity™ Matrix LCD Video Wall System is installed on a prominent wall on the first floor of the complex's Atrium Building, a 13,000 square-foot space that is open to visitors, tenants and their customers. "This is an important amenity for the Atrium Building and the complex as a whole," says Joseph Deglomini, Jr., Principal of Simone Development Companies, which built, owns and manages the Hutchinson Metro Center campus as well as other office, retail, industrial and residential properties in the New York tri-state area. "The Planar video wall is big and bright and perfect for showing sports and news programming and for promoting many things going on in the complex. So it encourages people to gather, relax during lunch or after work, and to learn about and take advantage of services and products available from the many retailers and businesses on campus." Among these tenants, he said, are the new Residence Inn by Marriott, LA Fitness and Dunkin Donuts. Others include a child-care facility, a café, a full-service bank branch, a dry cleaning service and a teleconference center.

The selection of Clarity Matrix was a collaborative effort, involving Simone Development Companies, Big Apple Technologies, other technology companies and AV Design and Integration, a leading audio-visual installation and integration firm in the New York area. This team researched a variety of available video walls and chose the Clarity Matrix MX46HDS after seeing it at industry trade shows and testing it at AV Design and Integration's facility in Elmsford, New York.

Image quality is a stand-out factor

"The deciding factor for all of us was its image quality," says Michael Demello, President of AV Design and Integration. "In particular, the fact that it is brighter than any other video wall we considered. This is critical because the video wall was to be installed in a brightly lit space in the Atrium Building and it needed to stand out under high sunlight and internal lighting conditions." Clarity Matrix features an ambient light sensor, which increases or decreases the display's backlight depending on the level of brightness (which can be up to 800 nits) in the room. Each Clarity Matrix displays features 1920 x 1080 resolution, 3500:1 contrast ratio and 10-bit color processing.

Display flexibility also factored into the selection decision. As an attraction and entertainment platform for different users, Simone liked the fact that Clarity Matrix could be used to show different content in various areas of the video wall or across the video wall entirely. Clarity Matrix accommodates and simplifies this with built-in Big Picture Plus™ Processing feature. "Also, the user wanted additional flexibility to display 'favorites' such as TV news or sports programming. Clarity Matrix is engineered with 40 recallable presets that each store input and layout settings and color levels, making it easy to switch between various configurations," says Demello.

Additional features contribute to best-in-class stature

Other important features include Clarity Matrix's off-board electronics design, which houses power supplies and other components in a remote rack room (up to 500 feet away), thus keeping heat-inducing elements away from the video wall, facilitating remote troubleshooting and easy software installation and updating, and giving Clarity Matrix its industry-leading profile (sub four-inch total mounted depth). Also, Clarity Matrix is installed on Planar's EasyAxis™ Mounting System, a unique system that offers a number of benefits. Among these are built-in, multi-axis cams that facilitate quick and precise alignment of all video wall displays; built-in cable routing; and a service mode feature that allows any display to be tilted out and removed for service or replacement without the entire video wall having to be powered down and dismantled.

"Our view is that Clarity Matrix is a best-in-class video wall in many aspects," says Simone Development's Deglomini. "Although we are just beginning to capitalize on its capabilities, we can see that Clarity Matrix is visually superior to other video walls; it looks amazing even in our bright-lit atrium space; and it will perform at a high level on a 24/7 basis for years to come."