Greg_E wrote:

Hardware and cabling $4,000.00, labour $6,000.00. That sounds about the right balance!

At $1,000 those CAT5 boxes sound pretty good value, though.

Have you looked at the AT-HD-V116? That will drive up to 50 feet without degradation, and at a cost of $950 is pretty attractively priced, too. The problem with that solution would be the price of the HDMI cables.

breakdown is:

$2000 for 16 transmitter ports
$1280 for 16 receiver devices
$4000+ for 16 LCD monitors
$7200 for 16 MX02 Mini

And that doesn't even get into the AV switcher with scaling so that all devices come out at the same resolution. So $7300 just to get the connections and I know the switcher will be more than $3000 if I get an Extron brand device.

NTI has a distribution solution but it looks like it will cost around the same for 16 displays, the advantage is that they have looping receivers which would cut down on the number of cables that have to be run from a central point.

I wasn't aware that you were including your monitors and Matrox boxes in that figure, since they're required as part of the rest of the setup anyway.

Depending on your monitors, you may be able to dispense with a separate switcher. However on those figures I'd be more inclined to look at a either a single large monitor or a projector-based solution.

How about a wireless solution? A single transmitter at the teachers computer and a receiver at each screen. If you set up with a one way broadcast it may not be too difficult.

If the 16 LCD monitors are attached to computers at the students' desks, then I would think a multicasting system over a gigabit network would be the easiest way to distribute the desktop of the teachers computer.

Yes that may be an option with a second video card to run the second monitor. The concern would be the bandwidth that the multicast is using while they may be using bandwidth to move video in the editor. What would be almost ideal for a multicast system would be if I can stream it to the client/app inside the LCD. Almost all of them now include a Netflix or similar app to receive streamed video. In the end this would be a much cheaper way to handle the issue. We have a couple of large Sharp Quatron monitors (great looking and super bright) that I can use for testing.

I do have a Western Digital networked HD video player box thing that I'll have to spend some time with to see if I can send a general purpose multicast stream that it can grab. These boxes are around $100 each so I might be able to get away with a much cheaper transmission system. This would allow students to browse to an instructional video share (assuming I can get anyone to make videos), might be able to do this directly with the LCD browser too.