Concept International at ISE 2023: Bendable and power-saving LED walls, media players with impressive power spectrum

Munich, January 11, 2023 – The leading digital signage trade fair, Integrated Systems Europe (ISE), from January 31 to February 3, 2023 in Barcelona, will showcase all the innovations that the digital signage market has to offer. Value Added Distributor Concept International from Munich will compete with highly flexible and energy-optimized LED walls, DS players with top performance at best prices and the self-built “FutureRaspi”, which fulfills the desire of industry and channel for a robust Raspberry Pi.

“For us, in addition to the incredibly important personal contacts, the entire ISE is under the guiding star of performance and innovation,” said Mike Finckh, CEO of Concept. “For example, we have the manufacturer FutureLED new in the program, which offers exactly that with the Flex and Eco series!” With “Flex,” the name says it all: the LEDs are mounted on rubber mats that allow for infinite bending, even in extremely small radii. In the hand, the LED mats can be run like a wave before being delivered fixed at almost any angle in the aluminum housing according to customer requirements.

“There’s never been brighter LED walls for the kilowatt”.

FutureLED’s Eco series for large-format LED walls, on the other hand, scores impressive efficiency gains. “Savings of 20 to 30 percent are realistically possible,” says Finckh. This is made possible by two technologies: ‘Flip Chip’, in which the diodes are supplied with power directly from below. The previously necessary and visually restrictive wire connection on the top side is thus superfluous. With ‘Common Cathode’ – simply put – the direction of the current is also reversed: the individual RGB diodes no longer receive power from a single source at the end of the circuit, but are at the beginning of the power supply, each channel has its own regulated access to the current and is only then grounded. This reduces the stray losses and enables the considerable energy saving.

DS players with best price/performance ratio

“With our new players, we are creating our best price-performance ratio to date,” Finckh says. Take Giada’s new Android 11-based micro PC DN76, for example: it serves demanding multiscreen applications and offers exceptional performance at an exceptional price, thanks to the RK3568, a high-performance ARM Cortex A55 processor with four cores: 175 euros is called for the wallet-size micro player. The small device in the metal casing offers 4K content for two displays and numerous interfaces. Thanks to its performance reserves, it can also serve as a human-machine interface (HMI) in industry. With an integrated AI processor (NPU), it can also handle lighter machine learning applications.

Players for every requirement

Intel’s 12th-generation Giada players, such as the fanless DF612, booksize PC D612 or OPS slide-in PC612 expand the bandwidth to cover every conceivable need in terms of size, performance, 5G and Wifi-6 connectivity.

The latest processor generation offers more performance with the same power consumption. Or put another way, with a current-generation Alder Lake CPU, you get the performance of a next-gen CPU from the previous generation. An i3/12th gen, for example, can easily keep up with an i5/11th gen.

Intel’s approach of splitting the up to ten cores into eco and performance cores is interesting. Individually switched on or off, they provide low consumption for simple tasks or fast performance under full load.

In addition, the trend in the digital signage player sector is to solder Intel CPUs back in and no longer plug them in, even in high-performance PCs. This enables highly variable clock rates from 1.0 GHz to 4.4 GHz at up to 55 watts – an incredible performance range.

Innovation on customer demand

“The FutureRaspi is a new homegrown product,” Mike Finckh cannot hide a little pride. “Because the computer didn’t exist like this before, but many customers and the channel wanted a super-stable Raspberry for industry and digital signage, we simply put it on ourselves.”

Concept packs the credit-card-sized single-board computer into a robust, fanless metal housing with VESA holes and equips the Raspberry Pi 4 with fixed HDMI adapter cables or fixed display port adapters. The advantages remain: Comparable performance to a standard industrial or mini PC at a price of only around 150 euros. The industrial and digital signage version of the Raspberry Pi 4 runs Linux (Raspberry Pi OS or Raspbian).

The first project for the self-build is already in the bag: An airport in Scandinavia uses 150 “FutureRaspis” monitors at the gates from three different generations. Depending on their age, they can be mounted either as a newer slide-in solution or via VESA drill holes at the corresponding cutouts. Older monitors thus get a second spring. The project is currently being expanded.

The ISE will take place in Barcelona from January 31 to February 3, 2023. Concept International will be exhibiting in Hall 6, Booth 6G625. Further information and data sheets at: www.concept.biz