MODULAR DISPLAY HISTORY Part Six

There was a moment in 2002 or 2003 when it seemed like there was only one company making LED display for the indoor rental market which is pretty good given that Barco had not even shipped an LED product prior to 1999 and did not ship an indoor product until 2001. 

If you wanted an indoor LED screen in 2002 or 2003 your options were Barco, Hibino, Lighthouse, and not much else. In the outdoor market there were some additional companies including Saco, Yesco, Opto Tech, Unitek, Daktronics, Sony, Mitsubishi, and a few others. It is important to understand that many companies at this point are buying complete LED subassemblies from Nichia. Either boards or LED clusters. This may have contributed the strong industry response to the MiraVision demo at NAB in 2002 because there were rumors that this screen was produced in tight cooperation with Nichia.

Barco had considered buying its way into the market and also met with companies like Lighthouse to look at partnerships but eventually the company opted to support an internal development effort led by Robbie Thielemans. 

When making the decision to pursue internal LED display development back in 1998 there was not a lot of information to go on. The indoor market overall was very small at the time. From a rental & staging point of view there were at best a few companies that had SMD based LED panels. The outdoor market was stadiums and specialty advertising. When a company was getting into the stadium market half the conversation related to insurance bonding and the competition (Daktronics) was entrenched. Music touring was moving to LED but everything else was a guess. There were still companies working on LED-alternatives such as plasma. 

At Photokina (Germany) in 1998 Barco showed an internal project code named Punch (a brand of Belgian beer). This was an LED display demo that was “literally a cookie box” with holes milled in it where the 6 mm oval LED packages peeped through after the application of silicone potting. But ideas make their way from sketches to mock ups to prototypes. So when Robbie says “imagine a cookie box with holes” it is hard not to jump ahead to the DLite or the ILite panels that would follow. But as simple as this demo was it was not far from the basic architecture for outdoor displays with the DIP packages potted to protect the lead frame from the elements. The panel did demonstrate an almost complete processing pipeline that would go on to appear in the DLite system.

DIP stands for Dual In-Line Package - This is the more official designation for lamp based screens that are also called Pin Through Hole. The DIP package came out of Fairchild Semiconductor. Why is it a DIP switch? That is why. The early LED market was dominated by DIP screens. Screens characterized by different fall-off in the red, green, and blue packages along with the slight variations in orientation of the LED packages after insertion and soldering. Tony Van de Ven at Lighthouse quietly advocated not trimming the pins tight to the back of the PCB because the long pins acted as a heat sink. And so ends this tangent.

Not everyone expected Barco to enter the LED market. Legend has it that Tony Van de Ven, who had hosted Barco when they visited Lighthouse in Hong Kong earlier in 1998, made his displeasure felt. Punch was not a huge success at the show but Barco was determined to deliver a fully realized outdoor LED panel at the ISA show in 1999. To meet that time table certain pieces of existing equipment were at least temporarily pulled into the design. The RCVDS projection switcher was used as a processor. A line doubler was repurposed as a digitizer for mapping the signal to the LEDs. The DLite panels included calibration and used DVI, which was robust from a pixel mapping point of view and in no other way. 

One thing Barco did entirely from scratch was the mechanical. Here the work with the cookie tin paid off. The DLite panel did not join the family of large brake form panels that were the standard in the outdoor display market. Instead it was a fully modular system. The DLite panel was much smaller at 448 mm x 448 mm meaning that rental companies would have some granularity when specifying displays. Barco would go on to supply 2x3, 2x2, 3x4 and other touring structures to their rental & staging clients. They showed up in big road cases which was always very strange. 

The size of the panel was partially driven by the design of the control electronics. The backplane had to be under 400 mm x 400 mm because of limits on surface mount production lines that were used by Barco at the time. The board included the three Altera FPGAs (1 red, 1 green, 1 blue) that drove the panel. The control board was larger than any of the four LED modules that fit onto the front of the D7 panel.

Another thing that Tony Van de Ven (and Lighthouse in general) took issue with was the virtual pixel approach used by Barco. The discrete red, green, and blue LEDs in a D7 pixel could be combined with LEDs from an adjacent pixel to form a third new pixel. The 14 mm D7 could therefore be presented as a 7 mm screen. Lighthouse pushed the advantages of their pixel accurate approach and in some cases interpolating these virtual pixels was not desirable and D7 owners would not use that feature. In 2020 when a large number of 4K video projectors are made with non-4K imagers the debate seems quaint. Discrete color LED displays lend themselves very well to this sort of manipulation in the right circumstances with the right content. There is every reason to expect that we will see the re-litigated in microLED display space.

Barco followed up DLite with an indoor SMD product called ILite. Ilite came out in 2001. The plan was to launch with a 7 mm product but Barco shifted to 6 mm because they wanted a 1mm edge on Lighthouse. This is all happening around the same time as Lighthouse’s failed 5 mm Osram based COB product. 

The ILite panel was 448 mm x 448 mm as was the Punch demo from 1998 so it is possible to make the assumption that the size of this very successful family of products was dictated by what size cookie box was available for the Punch demo. But ILite followed a different mechanical model than the DLite product. ILite used a cast magnesium frame that integrated all of the mechanical interconnection. There was no need for a separate rental frame in order to build an ILite wall. This frame was redesigned once the rigors of life on the road became apparent. The frame housed a LED panel with a removable input module that allowed a user to replace a panel without loosing signal to the rest of the wall. To the best of my knowledge this was unique at that point in time.

The first customer for ILite was Georg Roessler who bought the product after a demo and an all-nighter from the Barco team. Georg purchased a small amount for an auto show. Barco ended selling a lot of ILite to pretty much every rental & staging company but a large early customer for the product was VER and these purchases would transform the LED market over the next few years. Renting modular LED displays to a broad market as a dry hire company was not the same as renting projectors or cameras.

ILite went through a few generational changes (XP and BK) before being displaced by products from Korea and China. From Ilite Barco went on to experiment with COB and OLED and release products like MiPix, MiSphere, and OLite. Barco experimented with coated versions of ILite for television studios. One of the mock-ups during this period of time put COB LED modules on the ILite frame. This is well before flip chips and long before this effort stood any reasonable chance at success. But this is how we learn. Barco did eventually ship some very small 3 mm display modules and sold some into a Louis Vuitton install in Paris.

Robbie Thielemans left Barco soon after the launch of OLite and in an odd turn of events ended up doing some work on the Element Labs Cobra panel. The funny thing about COBRA is that if you rearrange the letters you get … BARCO. A lot of people in the industry came out of the Barco of that era. Steve Scorse (Unilumin), Marc van Eekeren (DetaiLED), Steve Simard (DetaiLED), Steven de Keukeleire (Aluvision), Dries Vermeulen (Brompton), Claude Ostyn, Bart Van der Beken … and many others. Former Barco employees are part of a critical triad of Belgians (Barco, Systems Technology, XL Video) who form some critical links in the fabric of the LED industry. Luc Neyt at ROE. Kristof Soreyn and the crew at 23. Frederic Opsomer, Stefaan Desmedt, Tony Van Moorleghem and others at PRG. It must be something in the beer. 

Interesting fact: You can drive a Barco DLite or ILite panel directly from a DVI output (some knowledge of DVI cable wiring needed) without the LED processor if you are so inclined.