Screen for Small Conference Room - Size and Resolution Questions

Question

I'll try to keep my questions generic so that it might help others in the future.

How should we go about choosing a screen for our conference room? What factors should we consider and what information or sites might help us choose the correct screen? Is it generally better or more affordable to use an overhead projector instead of a screen in a conference room?

Details Specific to Our Application:
We'd like to use this screen for basic video-conferencing. There will only be one person joining the conference room via video at a time. We also want to use the screen to view applications such as Excel Spreadsheets or MS Access application forms so that we can discuss application functionality and behavior.

I'm concerned that buying a standard computer screen could result in complaints about not being able to see, or more specifically, not being able to read the text or distinguish between controls in the application we might be looking at together. There will usually be about three to six viewers and they will be sitting anywhere from 6 to 15 feet away from the screen, some of them at a slight angle.

Answer 1

The general corporate staple screen is usually a 42" monitor with a minimum resolution of 1280x720 either mounted on a wall (sometimes multiple screens are used) or on a trolley.

It also depends on the size of the room - for bigger meetings the general preference is a ceiling mounted projector and a motorised retractable screen.

The prices of both options nowadays will be competitive so I suppose it's a question of preference. You can expect the monitor to be more durable as projector bulbs are fragile - and also projectors can be noisy too.