Digital Poster Or Digital Menu Board - What Is The Difference?

By Author: Dave
Total Articles: 9
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Digital posters and digital menu boards look basically the same, even some one in the digital signage industry sometimes have difficulty noting the difference.

Technology is driving digital signage into new areas and this brings with it some potential issues, well not all companies can afford to invest thousands of dollars in dynamic advertising, well the two options above can provide the same end results with minimal investment of time and money, so now everyone from car repair shops to lawyers can have these in their reception or customer waiting areas.

Digital posters were specially designed for the reception and waiting areas, so they can inform and entertain any customers when they are waiting for their meeting or their car. Now we see these in hair salons, dentists and even mom and pop stores.

Why a digital poster?
Selecting a digital poster is the entry level for any digital signage solution, as well as being the most affordable it is also the easiest to set up and configure. No software to set up or code just drag the images you want to use from your digital camera and drop them on to the memory ...
... card, then using any text editor create a list of the images in order that you want them to be displayed, then save the file with an xml extension and drop this too on the memory card.

Screen sizes, range from 20 inches and go up to 40 inches, can be mounted in either portrait or landscape position.

Benefits - affordable, easy to set up, easy to create a digital signage campaign.
Drawbacks - can only display JPEG images, MPEG video and MP3 audio files.

The media player is a solid state solution with no moving parts to wear out, the number one problem with hard drives is the cost related to replacing the moving parts, and this is why a solid state solution is the best on the market.

Digital menu board.
As the name suggests, these were initially designed for displaying eye catching digital menus in Quick Serve Restaurants (QSR), these come in two categories, the first having an onboard media player similar to the digital poster and the second unit has an external solid state media player.

Digital menu board with an integral media player is very similar to the digital poster, however these come in much larger sizes up to and including 82 inches, they use the same size memory cards from 64MB to 12 GB, enough for any digital signage campaign.

Alternatively, a commercial LCD screen can used and be connected to an external media player, these are normally hard wired using Category 5e data cabling back to a central point, due to the way these units are configured, you can add Flash content, such an image of a hot latte with steam rising from the cup.

Benefits - displays more impressive content, creates a WOW effect.
Drawbacks - cost more than digital posters, has to be wired into a network