University of St. Thomas Switches to Hitachi for OneVision Extended Warranty
St. Paul, Minnesota, March 1, 2017 – The University of St. Thomas sits on a 78-acre campus with beautiful historic buildings lining the pathways. Throughout the campus, classrooms are set up with a projector, screen and other media essentials to allow professors and staff to easily make presentations. Last year, Daniel Hoisington, Associate Director of AV and Classroom Technologies, set out to find new HD projectors with HDBaseT™ capabilities for a round of upgrades. During his search, Hoisington discovered Hitachi’s OneVision Program for higher education facilities and was able to buy and register nearly 100 HD Hitachi projectors for classrooms at the university. Hoisington says it was Hitachi’s pricing, features and extended warranty with the OneVision Program that made it easy for him to switch projector brands for the upgrade.
University of St. Thomas, a private catholic school in the heart of St. Paul, Minnesota, is home to over 10,200 graduate and undergraduate students. The university prides itself on offering more than 90 majors and seven professional academic divisions including College of Education, Leadership and Counseling; Professional Psychology; College of Arts and Sciences; Opus College of Business; School of Engineering; Saint Paul Seminary School of Divinity; School of Law and School of Social Work. Because the university offers such a wide variety of majors, classrooms on campus must have the right equipment to teach anything from science to journalism. That’s why Hoisington set out to find a reliable HD projector that was bright and featured built-in HDBaseT capabilities.
“We have over 200 classrooms throughout campus, and we also use projectors in our meeting rooms and event spaces,” says Hoisington. “We were looking for an HD projector that had HDBaseT built in and was also bright enough for our classrooms. Hitachi offered the right features at the right price point. In the end, the extra warranty coverage with the OneVision Program helped me feel comfortable in switching brands and upgrading around 100 of our projectors. The fact that the upgrade would give us nine free projectors was also a great perk.”
Hitachi’s OneVision Program is a rewards program for higher education facilities that is designed for the specific needs of colleges and universities. A majority of higher education facilities find that their projectors are being used an average of ten hours a day, five days a week, causing the schools to go through bulbs and projectors faster than most other applications.
Because of the extreme usage of each of the projectors, Hitachi created the OneVision Program that offers higher education facilities direct access to sales representatives, specialized pricing, expedited shipping on replacement units, extended warranty on both projectors and lamps and a buying rewards program with “buy three projectors get a free lamp,” or a “buy 10 projectors get a free projector” options.
With the switch to Hitachi projectors, Hoisington found that the projectors provide a valuable way to create a simple and reliable room setup without needing to dedicate receivers for each projector. And with vertical and horizontal lens shifting capabilities, professors and other staff have an unlimited number of ways they can use the projectors for their presentations.
The new projectors have been installed at the University of St. Thomas for six months now, and Hoisington is still experimenting with the new features he has brought into the classrooms.
“Right now we’re looking into networking the projectors together, which will be a big step for the AV department. We also want to look into the possibility of stacking the projectors for our larger rooms and auditoriums. There are a lot of features that I know we will get into with these projectors, but for right now it’s just great to hear the staff talk about how bright and crisp the new projectors are.”
For more information on University of St. Thomas, please visit http://www.stthomas.edu/
For more information on Hitachi projectors, please visit http://www.hitachi-america.us/projectors