Outdoor LED Displays: Common Types and Applications
Key Features of Outdoor LED Screens
How to Choose the Perfect Outdoor Digital Signage
Unilumin Outdoor LED Solutions: Case Studies
Trends of outdoor LED displays
With fast-paced modern life, people have become more dependent than ever on visual elements. Whether they're looking at a phone, laptop or tablet, they seek out data and information visually now more than ever before.
Historically, business and commercial property owners relied on painted or printed outdoor signage to give potential customers the basics, such as their business name, details about products and services, or a unique message or slogan. The tools available to them limited their communication and promotional options.
Digital innovations like cutting-edge light-emitting diode (LED) displays have turned outdoor signage into much more powerful tools. These dynamic and, most importantly, adaptive and updateable engagement tools can help you reach your target audience more effectively. Read on to learn more...
No matter the industry, business decision-makers often select LED displays and video walls for outdoor venues. Academic, government, hospitality, marketing, residential, retail, sports and transportation officials and other entities commonly use outdoor signage for advertisement, announcement, educational, entertainment and wayfinding purposes.
Many factors impact the type of product or products you might choose for your business, including your industry, the overall business environment, the installation site, and the content plan or strategy. Common applications include:
The sky's the limit when communicating important business, product and sales information. Dynamic billboards, in-window screens and electronic posters placed strategically near a business or high-traffic locations can offer everyday and important details about the business or commercial site, upcoming sales and special events.
Many businesses use their reach to help their community and neighbors. Digital signage on the side of a business building or sponsored by a company in a public space can supply information about local community and non-profit organizations and programs that help or welcome community members or ask for their financial or volunteer assistance.
Outdoor signage can distribute real-time local news, traffic conditions and weather. This type of signage includes more than billboards and posters. A public space, such as a bus or train station, community park or street intersection, might have interactive kiosks that permit users to pull up the information they need immediately, including local hotel, school, shopping and travel offerings and schedules, directions and maps, emergency alerts, and even entertainment and tourist destination details.
Businesses and entire cities use outdoor LED displays to draw positive public feedback while entertaining the masses. For example, displays mounted to the sides of a building might show holiday-themed content or fireworks. Some businesses allow artists to use their displays to showcase talent and make statements or offer everyday attractive and amazing illusions known as naked-eye 3D content. These displays and associated systems can make a part of a building look like it houses a giant game or a person or animal moving around in a room.
High-quality LED displays share specific features that are critical for outdoor usage. Beyond offering single- and multi-panel one- and two-sided adjustable brightness, full-color high- and ultra-definition products in a variety of shapes and sizes, an LED display manufacturer provides concave, convex, flat-surface, hanging and stacked mounting options with built-in safety grip handles and easy-access maintenance areas.
Features unique to outdoor screens typically exist to take usage and weather into account:
These dense pixel screens typically allow manual and preset brightness and color adjustments based on outdoor light conditions. As a result, the displays show just the right amount of both in bright sunlight, on a foggy day, and at night.
LED signage panels feature connected software and systems that make content uploading, scheduling, management and removal easy via any device (i.e., desktop, laptop, phone or tablet). This feature makes remote access and up-to-the-second changes possible.
Since most displays are on 24/7, energy efficiency is critical. Energy-efficient models guarantee lower operational costs, which means you can use the money you save to invest in other promotional and customer engagement strategies.
All LED displays are designed with hardware that protects against high humidity, hot and cold temperatures, and wet conditions like ice, rain and snow. Depending on the application and mounting hardware, many screens hold up nicely in high-wind scenarios as well.
Although it might seem like a one-size-fits-all approach might work best so that you can use your product in more than one way over time, some products and panel setups work better than others. You must consider various factors before selecting one or more products, such as your budget, the product's purpose, the content strategy you want to use to attract and engage people, the location of the installation, and even the local laws about outdoor signs.
For example, you need to ask yourself if a smaller or larger sign will be easier for your target audience to see and best for the location you have in mind. With car traffic, a billboard gains driver and passenger notice quickly. With foot traffic, you must decide if you want pedestrians to see the display up close, as with a digital poster, or at a distance, as with a billboard. An up-close option can allow for consumer QR code scanning and kiosk interactivity.
City officials might not permit you to install some products based on size or brightness because the location is too close to a residential area. In terms of sticking with a budget, larger signs have higher associated installation, electricity and maintenance costs than smaller ones.
If you want to take advantage of naked-eye 3D content opportunities, think creatively about how digital displays project content before you select a product. This technology works best when you recreate part of a building's architecture on the screen in high definition as a frame around the illusion of a windowed area. You can then project the movement of giant, lifelike people, animals and objects seemingly outside the building.
Unilumin's success with displays and lighting means we've had plenty of opportunities to provide clients with high-quality outdoor LED signage solutions. Our website has more than 1,000 case studies showing real-world applications in a variety of settings. Allow these examples to inspire you and help you narrow down your product selection:
- Riyadh Season, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, UfixII8/10, Uslim-O03, Kslim2.9: Unilumin helped the public celebrate one of the world's largest entertainment, economic and promotional events by turning the entire city into an immersive experience with more than 7,000 square meters of displays and naked-eye 3D content ideas.
- Lusail Stadium, Doha, Qatar, E Series: During the 2022 World Cup, Unilumin outfitted Lusail Stadium with a 70.78-square-meter scoreboard. In a sporting venue, this display can also offer sports fans and ticketholders instant replay shots and game highlights, athlete interviews, quick snapshots of people in the stands, advertisement details and emergency announcements.
- Ten Square, Landmark of Good, Singapore, Usurface III: The Ten Square installation has become a well-known landmark that offers both dynamic flat and naked-eye 3D content. People in their vehicles and at street level commonly see brand and product advertisements, community and event announcements, and nature scenes. The installation with Unilumin Usurface III panels also often displays mind-blowing visuals, such as floating boxes and liquid and claw machines.
- Shenzhen Media Group Building, Shenzhen, China, O Series: At 5,000 square meters, this example is the largest 4K resolution naked-eye 3D screen found anywhere in Asia. It has made the building a more recognizable local landmark and created both advertisement and reputational benefits for Shenzhen Media Group.
- Wageningen ROC School, Netherlands, UsurfaceIII8: Even schools can benefit from digital billboards. A vertical Usurface III, as seen with this school, provides a lightweight solution for keeping students, faculty members, guardians and the public informed about the school and the community.
Why do so many business and commercial property owners trust Unilumin to provide them with outdoor LED display solutions? Unilumin is an LED application pioneer and global industry leader that offers innovative, easy-to-install and long-lasting high-definition, ultra-slim displays and video walls built specifically with outdoor use in mind. Unilumin products are weather-resistant, handling sun and rain alike without breakdown. During regular or emergency maintenance, an employee or technician can quickly gain access to all necessary components. Unilumin also supplies extensive warranty and technical support.
With the advent of the digital age, traditional media and its living spaces are constantly being squeezed by emerging media. However, compared to the predicament of TV and paper media, outdoor advertisement has a different fate because of the uniqueness of LED display in audiovisual aspect.
When outdoor LED display brings a new situation and influence to outdoor advertisement, its medialization trend is gradually being developed by the media industry, which has huge development potential.
At the moment of consumption upgrading, because the outdoor LED display has a fixed position, it can become a regional sign. With the characteristics of various forms of expression, strong plasticity, high arrival rate and good transmission effect, outdoor LED displays also have many advantages, such as great influence on mobile people, stronger reality, repeated demands, high information arrival rate, etc.
The best viewing distance of conventional P10 and P8 display screens on the market is 8-24m and 10-30m respectively. When viewed from close range, the "graininess" of the picture will be very obvious. However, as end users demand higher display effect of the display screen, outdoor LED display with smaller spacing are bound to become more popular.
With flashing lights on the streets day and night, the outdoor LED display screens not only add a lot of color beauty to the city but also bring light pollution to many people. In recent years, with the development of commerce, the environment problems of light radiation caused by the outdoor LED display near the city business circle have caused more and more complaints from citizens. Especially with the government's emphasis on environmental protection and the improvement of residents' requirements for living environment, the problem of light pollution cannot be ignored.
Therefore, in the future development, manufacturers of outdoor LED display must carry out production according to the relevant "standards" to comprehensively improve their product performance so as to effectively control the light pollution of LED display.
With respect to the product itself, we will develop outdoor display products which can further reduce discomfort to human eyes. In fact, in terms of LED display technology, many products can automatically adjust the brightness according to different environment via their own systems.
At the same time, the multi-level gray correction technology greatly improves the excessive hardness of color, which makes people feel more comfortable when seeing the colorful display. These methods can greatly reduce the "light pollution" in cities. More importantly, we still need to give some thoughts to the standardization of management and operability of implementations so that outdoor LED display can truly enter the era of standardization.
The focus of competition in today's outdoor LED media industry is how to realize the interactive integration of audience and media through the application of technologies such as APP and AV technologies.
The new outdoor LED media, which continuously strengthens its interactive function can not only become a platform for audiences to obtain and exchange information more conveniently, but also attract more and more audiences to actively participate in communication activities.
More importantly, it will also lead to larger-scale secondary communication. When the interactive function of outdoor new media is fully integrated into the daily life of the audience, the communication effect will inevitably increase geometrically and the value of outdoor media "must choose" can naturally be highlighted.
Outdoor LED media also has its own users. To better understand the "viewing behavior" of their users, a media database must be established. The database of outdoor LED media is different from traditional media and network media. Its audience is changing. There is no time and space limitation and there will be no trace in the viewing process. However, "media integration" provides a good idea for database construction.
Outdoor LED media is static, but its audience is mobile. Each of the mobile audience has an almost uninterrupted signal transmitter--mobile phone. Therefore, the audience of outdoor LED media can be found by defining the scope of the audience around the LED media and tracking the information of mobile phone users.
In addition, the content setting of outdoor LED media is also a problem that big data needs to solve. Each media has its own capacity standard, TV has its own program duration, newspapers have its own layout and outdoor LED media should also have its own capacity--screen capacity. Screen load includes two criteria: one is the total duration of advertisement rotation and the other is the duration of a single advertisement.
The setting of these two standards will depend on the visual duration of the audience around the media. By studying the complexity of road conditions, car dealership and pedestrian speed, the duration from seeing the information of LED media to passively ending watching is determined to set the screen load of each media and obtain the optimal transmission effect of media content.
As an important element of city image, landscape, culture and life style, the future development of outdoor advertisement is bound to be influenced by the trend of urban development. In recent years, the city is gradually developing towards environmental protection, livability and futurization. Combined with the trend, it is not difficult to foresee that the characteristics of "futurization, digitalization, environmental protection, virtual reality, gorgeous interaction and huge scale" will undoubtedly become the development ideas of outdoor advertisement.
The traditional mode of outdoor advertisement has been difficult to stand out in the competition of many homogeneous, repetitive and equivalent advertisement information. Information spreading technologies, represented by naked eye 3D and new projection imaging technologies, especially digital multimedia visual communication technologies have developed greatly in recent years, which made tremendous progress.
In this situation, outdoor new media still need to consider the needs of the audience and enrich the visual performance of the media to realize the upgradation of the communication effect and complete the previously unimaginable communication breadth.
Facts have proved that outdoor advertisement can continuously meet the visual needs of the audience for innovation and changes and create classic legends with the development of technology to add infinite charm to itself with innovation.
Arguably, there is nothing in the world that cannot be sold. The vacancy rate of many large display screens is as high as over 70% for its high advertisement price which cannot attract enough brands.
The root cause of the high price is not only the higher purchase price at the beginning but also the exorbitant spending on electricity and energy. The LED billboards in the States have also been questioned by environmentalists, who pointed out that the energy consumption of such all-day LED billboards is 30-46 times of ordinary U.S. Households. The American Outdoor Advertisement Association issued a warning to reduce power consumption of LED display by five-sixths, which requires power consumption to be reduced from 660 watts to 110 watts per square meter.
Today, some LED display manufacturers in China have reduced to 100 watts per square meter already. Mesh Screen is a nice choice.
In addition to continuous optimization in quality requirements, display area, personalized customization and environmental protection, the after-sales demand oriented by high-standard services will also increase. These will be the key factors to widen the competition gap and gain market share. Whoever can take the lead will be in an invincible position in the future market competition and lead the new round of market demand.
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