SMARTboard 6065: Feedback if you have it, please.

[Andie]

Hi All,

 

Is there anyone who can tell me if they have good or bad experiences of the SMARTboard 6065? We have a load of SMARTboard 660 boards with UF75 projectors, but the board isn't available any more, and we need a new board for a new area of the building. Not keen to move away from SMART at this stage.

 

Thanks.

[sted]

if they are the new single pen "tin" boards i dont know a single teacher who likes them

[JonnyAV]

The 6065 is not a traditional smart board for use with a projector - it is an interactive panel and as such is bright, clear, heavy and expensive! We like ours

[JefGooding]

Hi Andi,

We are aprimary school and staff were using smart 660s and 560s and generally happywith them (although old ones were starting to have a lot of alignment issues) –Smart 11 software. Problems with loss of brightness was a bit of an issue toobut we just replaced them with £300 projectors every 3 years or so – so notmassively expensive.

Got ademo of Smart E70 and staff were all knocked out by it (although it seemed to meto be mainly hype – combination of a few flashy/gimmicky features of Smart 14software (irrelevant to hardware) and the fact that is was new and shiny.) Sowe got one on trial and put it in the IT room for everyone to use. Notmassively popular with those that tried it – for a variety of reasons – not having4 pens seemed to be a big issue. So our plan to put 17 more in around the schoolneeded more investigation.

Was toldby installers that 6065i had just come out and it had an active pen thing wouldsort out the main problems highlighted. To hedge our bets we got 2 of these and2 Smart 880s (projector).

After acouple of minor snags teachers loved 880s.

6065ishave been a nightmare for the teachers. There is a list of about 10 things theydon’t like about them (after a month of continuous use). Off the top of my headin order of moaningness:

Toosensitive (can very easily click by mistake without touching or with sleeveetc)

Existingsmart notebooks display incorrectly (initially we thought this was a upgradingto Smart 14 issue but now we believe this is about the fact the ratio haschanged from 4:3 to 16:9)

Nofreeze function.

Can’thave sound (from soundbar) without TV on (although this is fixable with a bigof rewiring but would need to be specified to installers)

Too small(smaller than E70 even)

Smudgeson screen

+ manymore (some may be related to smart 14 software though.)

So, weneed a serious think before buying the other 13 for the school. Our techniciansthink they are fine (but possibly don’t appreciate practical teaching issues).2 teachers say it is horrible (but maybe are just being luddite and not willingto look at benefits (they say there are none).)

For aneasy life I would just put in projector 880s everywhere and everyone would behappy they have got a new version of what they are already using. However,iFPD, although more expensive, are the way of the future and will avoid thehassle of projector replacement (which on the new short throw ones will beconsiderably more than £300). There is also the imperative to actuallychallenge staff to move on to improve their teaching.

Don’tenvy you. Have spent probably over 100 hours on this already (with a lot ofinstall snagging to deal with as well) and seems like it is very hard to pleaseanyone (let alone everyone).

 

Sorry about the epic post but would appreciate any info from anyone else with experience of these 3 options and advice.

 

[biggjb]

I can give you some further info on this. The Smart E70 is 70" and will fit where you had a Smart 660/560. However they are heavy so the wall must support the weight. Also the inbuilt Audio is not very good so you should think of a sound solution like a sound bar. It has all the usual inputs allowing you to run apple TV etc and the same functions as a projector

 

The 6065 has a 4K screen and better speakers than the E70, However it is slightly smaller at 65" and only has a HDMI input. This means that you lose any flexibility that you had with projector and IWB Also it doesn't have any freeze function or remote control. Thus I would go for the E70 version

[Educare_AV]

I would look at the Smartboard 885 16:10 ratio interactive whiteboard with an Epson EB575w UST projector and smart speakers. Personally for the money I don't think there is a better solution.

[Wilderbeest]

We've had problems with the 6065's we have installed. There is a firmware issue which makes them pretty much unreliable/unusable - Smart has NO IDEA when this will be fixed. The 4K feature is more of a problem than a help. Nothing has 4K capability as standard, so you will have to add in some extra hardware to make it work. £45 PCIe cards work well. Then the 6065 image will be beautiful, but is an extended desktop - unless you have a 4K monitor on the teacher station, allowing you to mirror. You will need to get some software to add the command bar to the 6065. (Something like display fusion). After all of this, the icons are too small to be usable. You can scale up text and icons, but it's system wide, not display specific and applications such as Sims do not like scaled text. So, we have ended up a) using them as expensive TVs until the firmware fix finally materialises b) using them at lower than 4K if we are brave enough to attempt an interactive lesson. We will probably not be getting any more 6065 units. Nice idea - they just don't deliver the exciting Bett promise.