Sept. 23, 2021 - Looking at the meeting trends of the coming years, it’s clear that although face-to-face meetings are not going away, video conferencing is the new norm. We will also have more hybrid meetings, with some people attending the meeting on-site and other participants joining by web conference. To support the human interaction and encourage collaboration between in-house employees and remote workers, the hybrid workplace needs more video-enabled meeting spaces.

But the power of video and great workplace visualization reaches beyond the walls of your meeting rooms and boardrooms. Think of your in-house auditorium which is a crucial platform to inspire and communicate to employees, partners and other visitors with engaging interactive content, or your corporate lobby, the essential content hub disseminating impressive branding visuals and informative digital signage.

Visualization is an important part of your workplace design which is why you need projectors! But how do you decide on what’s the best business projector for your workplace environment?

What are the challenges for workplace projections?

Ambient light conditions

Business projectors are typically they’re not used on such large screen surfaces as outdoor projection mappings, but they are nevertheless used in very demanding environments. Still, there are two things you most certainly need to keep in mind when it comes to the brightness levels of your projector.

Workplace projection brightness

First, today’s meeting rooms and lobbies are no black boxes. There’s artificial lighting or daylight beaming through the windows promoting a modern, open and more pleasant atmosphere. If you want projections to still be visible in your brightly lit spaces, you need some extra brightness power to outshine the ambient light. Also, the brightness requirements raise in bigger conference rooms with bigger projection areas. 

And secondly, you should know that if you choose to just project on the walls of your room (instead of on a projection screen), this requires more brightness levels from the video projector to counter the weaker wall reflecting capabilities. (Yes, even if it’s a white wall.)

Installation design

The second element to keep in mind is the infrastructural constraints of the workplace environments. There’s typically no room for bulky devices. You’re looking for clean, subtle installations that easily integrate in your setting. Your perfect business projector has a compact design and wide lens shift which enable easy integration so you can place/hang the device wherever you have the space. Short throw projectors are a perfect fit for smaller meeting rooms allowing you to put the projector closer to the projection area, and reduce on-screen shadows from people moving around in the room.

Workplace projection - low noiseAdditionally, projectors use a powerful light source to project your images. This light source emits heat, which is cooled down by built-in fans. These produce the familiar whirring noises in projectors. You don’t want the projector buzz to disrupt your important decision-making meeting or collaborative brainstorm session. So when choosing a meeting room projector, check the dB(A) level and go for projectors with optimized cooling design and low noise performance. 

Resolution

When you’re analyzing figures in a spreadsheet you want your projector to display clear and crisp details that do not tire the viewers, so the resolution and the image processing have to be of the highest order.

Low maintenance requirements

Efficiency is key in a workplace environment. You want your employees to focus on their tasks without wasting time on complicated technology. A great business projector excels in ease-of-use so your in-house facility managers can install, manage and monitor your tools in the most straightforward, simple way. It should be a durable investment with minimum maintenance requirements.

Barco projectors

Barco has a broad range of business projectors available in various sizes and weight, starting at about 5,000 lumens of brightness and with resolutions from WUXGA and WQXGA up to 4K UHD, to match the needs of all your specific corporate applications. We deliver wow experiences to your visitors in a townhall meeting room, experience center, lobby, multi-purpose auditorium or lecture hall. Taking the finest picture quality and highest reliability into account, these projectors make your communication, screen content and brand visuals stand out and create a lasting impact, anywhere in the workplace.

A complete workforce

The G60 series could be considered as our entry-level models with brightness levels up to 10.000 lumens. The three single-chip WUXGA projectors match the day-to-day needs for simple single-screen projection in your small to medium meeting rooms while still delivering uncompromised Barco laser projection quality. These projectors are also known for their simplicity: simple to install, simple to integrate and simple to maintain. And to blend in perfectly in the clean workplace setting, the compact G60s are also available in white.

Need more? The F80s brings more lumens and more pixels to your boardrooms and lobbies. A cost-effective 4K solution with a consistent color and brightness performance over time to show your brand video content in perfect resolution. And to make sure your corporate message gets across loud and clear, the F80s were optimized to achieve very low noise performances. With only 35dbA, you won’t even notice the projector is there.

For the big auditoriums or in-house conference rooms, you can also choose from brighter projector offering. Choose, the G100 which is one of the brightest single-chip projectors in the industry with powerful Barco laser projection and outstanding price-performance ratio. The G-series are also compatible with Crestron, Extron, PJLink, AMX, internal webserver and Telnet.

Or pick the UDM, the lightest 22K lumen 3DLP laser projector on the market weighing less than 50kgs. With this compact and versatile high-brightness projector, you deliver professional presentations and impactful corporate events with razor-sharp image quality. Furthermore, both projectors excel in energy efficiency which results in an A(+) rating according to Barco’s ecoscoring methodology.

Visualization

Projection is still the most budget-friendly option when it comes to furnishing a large number of meeting rooms in your workplace, but for some of the high-end applications like big lobby spaces or VIP boardrooms, it might be worth looking into the alternatives. Barco is one of the few manufacturers in the market to offer all (!) main visualization technologies, so we can provide you with a solution fully tailored to your needs. Check our full portfolio to discover more about the Barco LCD and LED solutions.

Screen management

Maximize the use of your boardroom, lecture theatres and seminar rooms with Barco’s screen management solutions. Our screen management systems capture all your content, process, convert and scale the signals, before distributing the result to the screens in your set-up. Even for simple meetings driven by presenters themselves, the Barco screen management systems lift your informative content to the next level to deliver a strong corporate branding, while enjoying a smooth content workflow behind the scenes.

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