the highest resolution Crestron touchpanel is the TPMC-17 at 1280x768. this is probably similiar to the resolution that your panels have. i don't know of any touchscreens that are true HD in that they support 1920x1080 or x1200. Crestron does offer some pretty good custom solutions in that you can make any display, whether a CRT, LCD, plasma, into a touchscreen with a video processor and a touch overlay. or, with the XPANEL solution, any PC or Intel Mac into a touchscreen with an overlay (or it is a tablet / UMPC). your panels use ethernet to stream media... a fine way of doing it, Crestron happens to use an analog transmission, also fine. your method is more scaleable and probably the way of the future, but there is something to be said about analog transmission too... no encoding, decoding, or other bandwidth limitations on the physical network. personally, i'd take the IP stream over analog any day, but there is definitely nothing "broke" about the way that Crestron does it, either.

Will Lifeware be open, so that those who wish to utilize non-Lifeware products and maintain the ability to change the system in the future as technology adapts? I'll gladly pick up an IR remote control and do my programming from the 6 buttons if I though that more advanced coding methods were not necessary, but right now there is no parity in the capabilities of these two approaches.