r/digitalsignage

Small restaurant owner here. We currently have two 55" consumer TVs doing menu duty and want to switch to three 50–55" portrait displays.

A local AV installer quoted about $5,250 before tax for:

• 3 Sony FW-55EZ20L commercial displays: $2,550
• Kanto 3-screen mount: $1,000
• Power/ceiling hardware: $240
• Installation: $1,450

I attached photos of the current setup/mounts and the quoted equipment list.

I’m sure this is probably the “proper” commercial solution. The issue is that we’ve historically used very barebones equipment, and we simply have a pretty slim budget for an unexpected upgrade like this. The TV turned off on the right has already given up and it wouldn't be an easy fix to just replace with another similar TV.

I’m mainly looking for legitimate cheaper alternatives in the same general direction. We’re willing to accept some tradeoffs in warranty, lifespan, hardware quality, or convenience if the setup is still reasonably safe and dependable for restaurant use.

Are there 50–55" portrait-capable displays or mounting approaches that would get this done for materially less? Would also appreciate thoughts on whether the ~$1,450 installation seems high and whether any of the existing ceiling setup looks worth reusing.

Just trying to figure out where the real minimum is before spending $5k+.

Our signage players used to be Raspberry Pis with Chromium on autostart. We kept losing them to crashed tabs, offline pages that never recovered and SD cards killed by venue power cuts. So we built a proper player OS and open sourced it (Apache-2.0).

Tessaro boots a Pi or x86 PC into your web content and keeps it on screen. It's the player, not a CMS: point it at your CMS's web player, a dashboard or your own page.

- Crashed tab or stuck browser recovers by itself

- Read-only system, updates that survive a power cut mid-write

- Offline files served locally, per-screen content from one URL

- Proxies, custom CAs, Chromium policies

- Managed from CLI, desktop app or browser on your own network

Tested on Pi 3B+, Pi 5 and x86, Pi 4 pending. Or try a whole device in a bundled QEMU window on an Apple silicon Mac.

https://github.com/alhafoudh/tessaro-os

I'm the author. Tessaro comes from 15+ years of Freevision building software and keeping client screens running. Built with AI assistance, every change tested end to end in CI and on real hardware. Apache-2.0 with an SBOM for every image, so you can use, modify and ship it commercially and know exactly what's inside. We offer paid support, but it needs no account.

What do your players fall over on most?