Choosing A LED Screen For Your Business

LED screens are the huge digital screens you see at sports events, in bank lobbies, shopping malls and other public places. The reason why LED screens are so popular with advertisers is because they can be seen in direct sunlight from 300 metres away.

Because LED screens use very bright displays with resolutions that are very different from TV screens, where you want to position your LED Screen and how far it will be from your viewing audience is important when choosing one.

Manufacturers will specify a minimum viewing distance and maximum viewing distance for each model. That means where you plan to position your LED screen is critical to choosing the right one. Seen too close, the picture can be hard to look at. You may need more than one to cover multiple viewing angles

Factors that impact viewing distance and choice of LED screen are the following:

• Location
• Screen size
• Resolution
• Variable light intensity

Location

LED screens can be indoors or outdoors. For indoors, you should consider mounting them high on walls or hanging from ceilings, in lobbies, foot of stairways or escalators, or at the end of long corridors.

For outdoors, they can be on building walls, on poles, along the highway in place of billboards or mounted on a mobile truck that drives to wherever you want to advertise.

Generally your audience is mobile, either driving by, walking by, or passing through, so locate them where there is a lot of traffic and use them for quick impact messages, not lengthy informational messages. However, you can use live content, such as streaming video, if you want to.

Screen Size

LED screens don’t come in standard sizes like a TV but are built to order from smaller modules that vary in size from a 25 cm square up to a little over a metre across. The viewing distance is the most important factor in determining size. As a rule of thumb the screen size (the distance between diagonally opposite corners) should be about half the minimum viewing distance and about a tenth of the maximum viewing distance.

The screen in a lobby might be a small 5-metre screen with a viewing distance of 10 to 50 metres. The screens at a sports event might be around 20 metres with a practical viewing range between 40 and 200 metres.

In a shopping mall, figure out the furthest point from which you want people to be able to see the screen and use that distance to determine screen size. If it’s 100 metres away, you want a 10-metre screen (about 9 metres wide by 5 metres high) and then place it at a high point so that the closest shoppers won’t be too near.

Resolution

The modules used in LED screens are made up of cells, called pixels, and each pixel is made up of one or more LEDs. A full colour screen will need at least three LEDs per pixel, one red, one green and one blue. These three colours can be combined at varying intensities to make up over 16 million colours from black to white.

Resolution is measured by pixel pitch and pixel density.  Pixel pitch is the distance between each pixel, which varies from about 5 mm to 30 mm. The distance from the screen at which the dots can no longer be distinguished by the human eye is about 1 metre for every millimetre of pixel pitch so if your audience is going to be viewing at ten metres you want a pixel pitch of 10 mm or less.

Pixel density is the number of pixels per square metre of screen space but the resolution is relative to how close you’re viewing from. What’s more important to the viewer is the width and height of the LED screen in pixels.

If you’re too close to the screen all you can see is dots. As you move further away the shapes look like children’s Lego bricks but, from far enough away, the picture looks whole and natural. If you choose a low resolution screen, it will look great with very simple pictures in bright colours. For more complex graphics, go with a higher resolution if possible. If you only want to display or scroll characters (letters and numbers), then a lower resolution LED screen will work fine.

Variable Light Intensity

Today’s screens can now save you money in running costs by offering variable light intensity. That means adjusting the screen’s brightness to suit the conditions. At night, you can turn down the brightness without losing picture quality and in direct sunlight you can turn it up to full. You can do this automatically, reducing intensity as the sun goes down. If you’re using outdoor LED screens, this is an option worth investigating.

Other Articles

• Launch Your Product With A LED Screen
• Where To Locate Your LED Screen
• Choosing Content For Your LED Screen

| Outdoor LED Screens | Indoor LED Screens |