We are all aware of how quickly technology is progressing, and we just get used to the new way of doing things in any given area and BOOM! It’s bigger, better, brighter, and faster than ever!
If you have ever been to Vegas or Disney World or even your local shopping mall, you have seen super large video screens with imagery promoting products, services, and entertainment in brilliant colour and amazing resolution!
Traditional LCD video walls are made up of a group of commercial displays installed together which produce one large picture. The lines, or borders between those displays are called bezels and you can buy the displays with very thin bezels so there is not much of a frame around the display. Sometimes these bezels can be just a few millimeters, but no matter how small they get you can still see those lines. You might see on TV or a newscast where they have an LCD video wall behind them, and you see the lines. A lot of emergency centres like Emergency Services, and control centres like nuclear plants, have these massive LCD walls.
Traditional LCD Video walls are still being installed in many locations, and this is still an option, but this is an older technology. If you want a super large display today, you have a couple of alternatives. You probably won’t go out and purchase a big super bright projector to project your images on a wall, even though you can project it to produce an extremely large image. That’s no good for a mall or exterior building because you can point the brightest projector at a building at 12:00 o’clock noon and nobody’s going to see a thing. It’s just too sensitive to the light.
Another option would be a super big display. You probably have a couple of TVs at home, maybe even 70 or 80 inches, big, massive ones. The biggest displays right now that you can buy would be 98 inches and they’re huge; 98 inches measured diagonally. I can tell you from experience that they don’t fit in most elevators, and they don’t fit around corners in many staircases, so perhaps this is no longer the best option!
The solution is LED walls, not LCD walls with the borders, not cumbersome large displays, and not projectors. LED walls are little panels about the size of your hand, that are like wafers and you lock them together on a wall in any shape you want, and there’s no lines. Recently in Las Vegas at Infocomm, Samsung showed off their cutting-edge LED wall called simply, “The Wall”. It has a super small pixel pitch, meaning their pixels are very close together and it’s giving you 8K content. When you buy a Hi Def TV today it’s 4K and this is 8K. That’s twice the resolution and appears as a real 3D effect because the resolution and brightness are so good.
We’re installing this product in a couple of months right here in Halifax. These panels are modules or wafers with light emitting diodes or LEDs. These little panels with all the microscopic lights on them, give you the appearance of a massive luminous wall, with no junctions, or borders in between. You can’t see any borders because the pixels are lined up beside each other and there’s no frame. They’re typically square but they can come in any shape or size you want. They can come curved so that you can wrap a display around a column or butt up against each other to form a corner. The only restriction for size is controlled by your budget. If you want to have your boardroom with a half wall or a 6-inch video running around the entire perimeter of your wall, with an image, you can do that.
I’ll include links at the end of this article with some images and further specs on this exciting technology. If you go to Vegas, you can see these brilliant displays covering the whole side of buildings, high up on the massive walls where you can see a display of what’s going on inside the casino or entertainment venue. I’m on the sidewalk and I’m looking up at that building, hundreds of feet away from those pixels, the microscopic lights can be really far apart because I can’t tell the difference from such a distance. In a situation where I’m standing closer to the display such as a boardroom, I would need those pixels to be closer together, otherwise it looks like a bunch of light bulbs on a board. The cheapest type would be about 4 millimeters apart, and you wouldn’t want to be too close. The newest ones, the most expensive ones like the one which we’re installing in Halifax has a .63-millimeter pixel pitch, so that’s the distance between each microscopic light. You can get pretty close to that one and still not see any spaces between pixels. The cost variable relates to that difference between the 4-millimeter pixel pitch and that .63-millimeter.
Another big thing with these LED walls is that typically you get 100,000 hours usage time, versus about 50,000 hours for LCD video walls. There’s no washout, no size restrictions or problems like small elevators and stairwells. The images on LED Walls retain their integrity no matter what angle they are viewed from, unlike LCD walls which can appear distorted when viewed from below or side-on! Prices are still high for these premium products, but the economies of scale are kicking in and every month the price is going down. I was in a Sobeys grocery store here in Halifax recently and noticed they had a huge display up high, above the produce section, with a large pixel pitch, but it was incredibly bright and beautiful, and it caught my eyes. It was such a vibrant, bright, colourful display of technology that we’re seeing more and more places. We’re going to see it really take off in the boardroom very soon as well.
Samsung’s The Wall | MicroLED Displays | Samsung Business
Ultra Thin Direct View LED Display | LG US Business
LCD video wall vs. LED panel wall. Is an LED panel wall the right fit? (promotion.tech)