When Southern Illinois University Evansville (SIUE) began looking for a new vendor for its campus and classroom display systems, the level of quality the IT services (ITS) department wanted seemed more “wish list” than “checklist” – but the university’s AV integrator was ready with a solution featuring NEC laser projectors.
Located across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, SIUE is a mid-sized university of about 14,000 students. The university has employed digital signage and projectors in classrooms to facilitate learning and engagement since the early 2000s, so ITS had a long-standing partnership with a particular projector vendor. [related]
When that vendor stopped selling its projectors in the U.S., the ITS staff began its search for a new provider to replace all projectors across campus.
“We didn’t want a hodgepodge of different kinds of products from different vendors,” said Mark Dorris, the SIUE manager of ITS. “We wanted consistency.”
Dorris and his team turned to Schiller’s, an AV integrator located in St. Louis that SIUE has trusted for decades.
The company’s group manager of the technical services department, Matt Ursch—an SIUE alum—has sold AV equipment to the university since he started at Schiller’s in 1987, and he helped design and engineer most of the campus-wide AV infrastructure.
“SIUE needed me to specify projectors for the bulk of its standard classrooms that would easily integrate with the existing room/screen parameters and the existing Crestron room control systems, as well as projectors for classrooms that have had no AV technology up to this point,” Ursch said.
Simplicity for SIUE
Having projectors that would integrate with current classrooms was particularly important for SIUE staff, said Dorris.
“Some of our older rooms had cabinets and piping in the way of where some projectors would have to go, so we needed a product that had different throw distances that worked for what we needed based on where we had to put it,” he said.
“I was hoping for something we could simply mount in the drop ceiling. We also wanted the ability to change out lenses.”
SIUE’s ITS team tested two manufacturers side-by-side in classrooms for a semester before choosing NEC as the winner. The university was familiar with the company, having used NEC displays for its digital signage around campus for messaging, way-finding and campus safety.
“Reliability is our main focus, because we don’t want projectors cutting out mid-class, and we want to keep maintenance low,” said Dorris.
“With our first batch of NEC laser projectors, we got a five-year warranty. Our previous vendor offered three years, which blew us away, so getting five was fantastic.”
SIUE also needed projectors with lens parameters that allowed them to replace the existing projectors into many existing drop-ceiling classroom locations without the need to relocate the existing structural ceiling mounts,” said Ursch.
The ability to not to have to relocate the structural ceiling mounts would save hundreds of hours of labor costs, he said.
School officials replaced the discontinued NEC NP-P451W and NEC NP-P452 projectors with the NP502WL and NP502WL-2 laser projectors.
“We have about 150 classrooms that all use projectors, and we didn’t want instructors to have to stop class and wait while we change a bulb,” Dorris said.
“The laser models are pretty much maintenance-free. There’s no bulb to replace and no filter to clean; you basically turn it on and let it run till it dies, with nothing to worry about in between.
“We also knew that moving to NEC laser projectors meant once they go out, they’re just done, so we had to have a great warranty, too,” he said.
Campus-Wide Enthusiasm for NEC Laser Projectors
Dorris added his team has been happy with NEC on the customer service side as well.
“In one instance, I said the NP-P502WL would have to support the power on function over HDBaseT for us to deploy them widely,” he said. “Rather than [customer service] making some empty promise, within weeks, I had a firmware update that implemented the requested feature.”
NEC laser projectors are now deployed across the university, in all sizes of learning spaces, including computer classrooms, labs, smart classrooms and active learning classrooms. Large auditorium classrooms also use projectors, Dorris said, “because of the size of image you get with a projector.”
Laser units are not yet in every classroom; they are being phased in over the next two to three years, he added. SIUE has 57 of the NEC NP-P451W and NEC NP-P452 projectors still in use, with 35 NP-P502WL and NP-P502WL-2 being phased in. A PA622u shows live HD video in SIUE’s nursing simulation lab for in-class students to observe.
“I’ve gotten comments saying these are a lot brighter, sharper and more color accurate,” Dorris said. “For example, our design faculty members show a lot of paintings for art history, and they said these are the most color-accurate units we’ve had so far
“We want to make it easy for the faculty, so they can just hit the ‘on’ button and it works, so we use a standardized touch-panel control system. That way, there is no confusion from room to room or from projector to projector,” he said.
Dorris emphasized how pleased his team was with the overall reliability of the systems.
“The ITS department’s No. 1 goal is to keep our classes running with no downtime, and I’m very happy that the NEC laser projectors can help accomplish that,” he said. “It means a lot to us that we can count on them.”
