MODULAR DISPLAY HISTORY Part Nine

“I just have a few forms for you to fill out …”

When LED video display manufacturers in 1995 and 1996 sat down at their work stations with their bulbous cathode ray tube based monitors to specify what customers would require of their new LED products they would reference experience. The market, like the “new world”, is a test of conforming things to your expectations until your expectations fail to adequately capture what you encounter. Bias confirmation in design. The future would be a lot like today so we are bolting this new adaptation onto our existing templates. 

Graham Burgess (DigiLED) started out with Sony working on actual Jumbotrons. People still cal them Jumbotrons. —Last Friday my son graduated from high school in a parking lot where the school assured us there would be two Jumbotrons but much to my disappointment they were two outdoor LED screens. How the school was supposed to find working CRT based screens from the mid-90’s is not my problem. I was promised Jumbotrons.— Between 1992 and 1997 Graham had worked through several different companies to make Jumbotron panels suitable for touring. In 1992 Sony was using a subcontractor that worked for JVR (Jongenelen Video Roosendaal) but Sony would eventually move to Tomcat (an open space frame) and then on to VIP, where Frederic Opsomer designed a touring frame. Every step yielded a slightly different product. It was a steady incremental evolution based on a growing understanding of the market. 

This evolution of touring solutions (and installation solutions) for Jumbotrons would be the template that many early LED displays companies would follow. The mechanical systems would be like Jumboton frames but a little more thin. And the market developed over time as the applications became better understood and the market produced monolithic die cast frames and space frames and hybrids of the two things. In hindsight this gives the appearance of destiny. But one of the fascinating bits of history in the modular display timeline is “reinvention”. The process of discovering something that had been done in some other segment of the business. And this happens in other industries and across cultures and even within this author’s own personal notebooks. So the Shenzhen public frame obscures what came before it. And the die cast 16:9 install frames obscure that preceded them. The things we use now feel inevitable right up until something new comes along and then collectively we forget about the previous thing. 

Tony Van de Ven (Cree and Lighthouse) said something early on that has stayed with me. He said it was all about shifting the intelligence around the system. Where do you put the processing? How smart do you want the module? This is partially a cost thing but also partially a complexity thing. This is why we have receiver cards and hub boards. And it is why the Sony Jumbotron also had a hub board. A board that could extract the pixel data for that subset of the overall display and that could then distribute that information to two or four display modules. The LED display added a lot of complexity to this model because the displays would have more resolution and were dependent on large numbers of DIP ICs that drove the arrays of DIP LEDs. The complexity that was contained within the vacuum sealed glass box of a Jumbotron module (Futaba) or Diamondvision module (Itron) was suddenly on the outside exposed and consuming large areas of printed circuit board. It was necessary to consider the value of putting the driver in the LED cluster versus leaving the driver on a board full of drivers connected to a bunch of dumb LED clusters that could be easily sealed against the environment. What is the value of an intelligent cluster or an intelligent module? You can see a slightly different decision making process at work in the Invision Microsystems screen if you watch Tom Mudd’s teardown. 

This all matters for a couple of reasons. There are a lot of different ways to dice up the path from a content source pixel to the optical output of an LED. And there are a lot of different ways to package that display so that it can all be assembled and disassembled with ease. And the way we do it now is not the only way and it may not even be the best way. The move to microLED almost certainly means that hardware designers will have less options available to them when they go to design whatever screen they are designing in 2030. For the people making displays with next generation microLED LDMs (LED Display Modules similar to an LCM - Liquid Crystal Module - used in flat panel display production) the lessons of the last 25 years may need to be set aside because the accuracy required for 0.5 mm pixel pitch display walls will require a new mechanical architecture with much tighter tolerances. 

But perhaps another modular technology will appear that will offer superior performance for lower resolution displays. There is still some level of dissatisfaction with the performance of video displays in color rendering relative to print for certain applications. There is room to improve the performance of outdoor advertising displays. Or perhaps there will be a new type of transflexive or transflective outdoor pixel that integrates a new highly efficient light source in a switchable reflective light valve (I am 100% dealing in hypotheticals) or another type of display that offers a low power reflective display capable of high quality CMYK color reproduction (I am obviously actively trying to get more print people to read my articles). For those making new types of modular displays it may make sense to build upon the collected knowledge of the last 25 years. To revisit some decisions that were made in the 90’s or the 00’s or the 10’s before simply bolting these new concepts onto the thing that is popular at the moment. 

“Answer for this would trace back to 1992, and just can’t be found.”

QSTECH (Xi-an, China), one of the first LED display companies in China, replied to a request for information and this sentence is critical to me. Once this information is lost we have no way of getting it back. This is our history as an industry. 

“In March 1993, QSTECH and Foshan Optoelectronic Equipment Factory jointly developed the VGA and video synchronization LED electronic display screen, which was the first LED display in China at that time. At that time QSTECH didn’t have a specific name for each product, given there were only few products in the market at that time.” The screen below is the first QSTECH screen to be documented.

“In 1993, along with the development of China’s stock and securities industry, domestic LED market started to grow rapidly.” Infocomm Connect is this week. I am sure all your favorite LED partners will be there and would love to see you. And I would not mind if you pointed them to these links. History is important.

LINK TO DISPLAY SURVEY - CHINESE

LINK TO DISPLAY SURVEY - ENGLISH

Thanks to Dina Dai 戴晶晶 for the translation to Chinese.

Over the next couple articles we will touch on curved displays, flexible displays, and distributed low resolution displays.