Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How The World’s LARGEST Screens Are Made”.
If you’ve ever been to a sporting event or concert, you’ve undoubtedly enjoyed watching an instant replay or an awkward kiss on a Jumbotron and if you’re a great big nerd like me, you’ve probably wondered how exactly they make those things great question, fellow nerd, because they’re engineered To be so, massive Jumbotrons are not just super-sized versions of the kind of TV that you would find at the local Walmart, and they are in fact built quite differently than regular TVs or monitors to find out how we reached out to some manufacturers of these displays And ended up hearing back from Daktronics who weren’t able to tell us any proprietary information but definitely helped us out. So early jumbo Tron’s from the 1980s used cathode ray tubes or CRTs, similar to what you’d find in old school home televisions. But, unlike normal TVs, which used only one cathode ray tube, these jumbo Tron’s had many of them with each one, only being responsible for a handful of pixels instead of the thousands of pixels that were produced by standard TVs at the time. This meant that early on even large, jumbo Tron’s had pitifully low resolution.
In fact, one early Jumbotron model with a diagonal size of 30 feet had a resolution of 240 by 192 pixels, that’s well below even a VHS tape, not to mention that it was extremely heavy and thick making mounting it above an arena very difficult, oh yeah, and It consumed thousands of watts of power. Now one intermediary solution was to use plasma displays, but they too had issues with weight and they were prohibitively expensive. Now, in hindsight, the solution to all of these problems seems pretty obvious. Doesn’T it why don’t you use lightweight? Cost-Effective compact, red, green and blue LEDs, then you can have your full spectrum color cake and eat it too, but unfortunately, blue and green LEDs, particularly bright ones, were much more complicated to manufacture back then due to complexities with their required chemicals. Now, today, those problems are mostly solved and most jumbo Tron’s work by using exact that principle. So they’ll have one LED module per pixel with each module containing proprietary wiring, so not like an HDMI connection and then a number of red, blue and green LEDs, along with a certain amount of video processing hardware, depending on the manufacturer. In order to make fine adjustments to the image quality, now some screens use through-hole LEDs with reflector cups.
This makes them brighter and helps them deflect sunlight for outdoor and long-distance applications. Others use surface mounted LEDs without the reflector cups, giving them better viewing angles for places that don’t have to contend with the Sun like indoor arenas, for instance. These modules, then, can be up to several centimeters across for larger screens, meaning that at typical HD resolutions, modern Jumbotrons actually end up being really big, which they can get away with, because most of the viewers will be sitting far enough away from the screen. For the picture to still look pretty darn sharp many venues are actually more interested in upgrading their Jumbotrons to HDR versus 4k, because at typical viewing distances, greater contrast and dynamic range is believed to make a bigger difference to the perceived image quality.
But back to talking about size, the largest indoor Jumbotron covers nearly 65,000 square feet. It can be found in Atlanta, at mercedes-benz Stadium, and it’s ring shape is a great example of how the modular construction of modern Jumbotrons out of these little LED modules can make them highly customizable, but being huge and modular. Aren’T the only ways that Jumbotrons are different from smaller screens they’re, also driven differently from an entire control room that has to have equipment, powerful and flexible enough to change. What’S on the screen quickly and accurately, depending on the displays aspect ratio, hence all the little buttons that you see on a typical Jumbotron control board. This enables the right camera, feed or visual effect to be displayed at the right time and because Jumbotrons have to be visible from far away as well as in bright outdoor conditions. Their brightness goes far beyond what you’d see on a regular display. It’S not uncommon. In fact, for Jumbotrons to have thousands of nits of available brightness, like the scoreboard at TIAA bank in jacksonville florida, which can get up to nine thousand myths. To put that in perspective, the average home TV will output around 300 nits with a fancy HD our home TV, doing about a thousand nits and change. So this requires a special grade of LED that can even require special cooling due to its immense power draw. Even though modern LED based jumbo Tron’s are much more power efficient than 80s and 90s technology, the screens are still notorious power hogs due to their sheer size.
The well-publicized sideline displays that AT .