A Review of current technologies available in the market
Outdoor LED displays are being used both for outdoor media purposes in fixed installations as well as for the outdoor LED displays rental market. Outdoor LED displays offer extremely high weather tolerances with front protection, as well as smart ventilation and cabling systems.
Outdoor LED displays are proven and tested worldwide and offer extremely low failure rate as well as consistent image and high brightness.
Outdoor LED Rental Displays are constructed using lightweight aluminum modules offering quick connection systems and load carrying frames enabling to hang the display from any truss system without the need for a back support.
Fifteen years ago, when mentioning an LED one would refer you to children toys or to an operational indicator on household electricity. LED's were mostly used to tell us if something is on or off.
Then one day someone thought, why not take many of those LED's, place them together, control their brightness individually and create outdoor LED displays, and guess what, it really worked. This is the beginning of story about the outdoor LED displays.
Currently, most of the markets of outdoor LED displays are still descendent from that first LED display and use the same 5mm or 3mm oval lamps, surrounded in silicone glue for water protection.
5mm oval LED lamps have many advantages :
- they offer high brightness
- they are easy to waterproof
- they offer massively experienced technology and color balance and tones have been perfected over the years
- they are cheap to manufacture and purchase
- they can be hand soldered (important for small and Chinese manufacturers).
but they also have some serious disadvantages:
- every LED represents a single color, meaning that high pixel pitch is impossible (space restraints) and at close view (even from 5 meters) you can easily see each color separately
- they have high protrusion over the PCB, making them extremely easy to break in front impact and requiring high masks which reduce viewing angles.
Currently , Outdoor LED displays range in resolution between 40mm pitch for extreme viewing distance installations (on top of a building) , 20mm pitch which is quite common for outdoor advertising displays and 10mm pitch which is getting into the rental market of outdoor LED displays.
Most of the outdoor screens today offer "Virtual technology" which uses adjoining pixels to create "virtual pixels" allowing to present X4 times the actual resolution (For example a 10x10 pixels module suddenly is able to display 40X40 pixels) That sounds great in theory but in reality "virtual" picture is mostly muddy and is in no means comparable to outdoor LED displays with even X2 the resolution let alone the X4 claimed. But hey, as a marketing tool it works great, why call a 20mm pitch display 20mm when you can call it 10mm.
In recent years, with demand for higher quality displays, even for outdoor application more and more companies are offering outdoor
displays with SMD LED's.
Normally, outdoor SMD LED's are of the 5050 variant which means they are 0.5cm across and in a 3in1 formation meaning that all 3 basic
colors are in a single packaging.
overall SMD LED's offer better picture quality then oval LED's in the same pixel pitch due to the unified housing of the different colors producing a "point" pixel instead of a wide spread one as in the oval LED's.
However, it must be taken to consideration that SMD LED's also have major shortcomings. They produce more heat , have less than half,
the lifespan of oval LED's, are harder to waterproof and overall offer much lower brightness which declines more rapidly than outdoor LED's.
in the following years we will see SMD technology develop and better itself and gradually replaces oval LED's , first in the rental industry and finally in the outdoor led displays advertising markets.
But when you purchase outdoor LED displays, don't just automatically go for the "newest and hottest" technology, consider the downsides
of each of the options and then decide what is right for you.
