Digital Signage Resolution Trends

In the world of software and all things digital it’s sometimes interesting to pause for a look back at where we’ve come from and the trends over time. Today, we’re looking at digital signage resolutions.

Recently (this is being written on April 28, 2013) iTunes celebrated it’s 10th birthday. We can’t think of one person (under the age of 60) that hasn’t used or interacted with iTunes in some way – can you?  It would be a huge understatement to say iTunes forever changed the music industry and content delivery to the consumer.

Over that same 10 year span much has changed in the key staple in the digital signage world – screen resolution.

Think about this for a moment, in January 2000 it was reported that 56% of the monitors or screens used for computing and video were at an aspect ratio of 4:3 with a resolution of 800×600.  Only 25% of respondents had upgraded to a widescreen 16:9 aspect ration with a resolution of 1024×768, and only 4% had reported using a resolution screen higher than 1024×768.

A mere six years later the shift to higher resolution was significant – 800×600 usage was down to 20% with  1024×768 up to 57%, and higher resolution screen deployments were up to 17%.  Currently, the shift is nothing short of dramatic.  Users report only 0.5% of 800×600 4:3 resolution screens still in use, while 1024×768 has now dropped below 10% and higher resolutions of 1920×1080 or greater are the norm at a whopping 90%.*

As a digital signage software company, Visix sees this trend continuing. So, our creative team builds all of their designs in at least 1920X1080 for clients’ projects.  We’re also recommending that our channel partners and clients look at equipment and content creation at these higher resolutions.

Just as the current consumer now expects music delivery on demand through iTunes and other mobile apps, your digital signage resolution should meet the market expectations of this same consumer.

*Stats pulled from https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp