LED Walls VS Projection for Live Events

Why LED panels instead of projection?

You may ask yourself, why not simply use the age-old projector and projection screen? It’s simple, reliable, and it’s been used over and over. That may be true, but LED wall panels are becoming the new standard in outdoor and indoor video displays for many reasons.

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BRIGHTNESS

The brightness of LED screens is one of the main reasons they rule over projectors, especially during the daytime or in a well-lit environment where a projector set up will be washed out. Projectors have to shoot the image to a projection screen via bulb or laser. This light source must compete with ambient light, such as overhead lights, stage lighting, or sunlight. This is particularly noticeable in settings that are not in complete darkness, such as outdoor concerts, tradeshows, wedding receptions, brewery openings, and more.

An 8,000-lumen projector, which is twice as bright as your average conference room projector, will fill a 7×10′ screen with an average brightness of 110 nits – a measure of brightness of the image. In contrast, an outdoor-rated LED wall such as our Absen X5 has a brightness of 5,000 nits, making it viewable even in direct sunlight.

Projector bulbs will lose brightness over time and use, with a noticeable decrease in luminosity even after the first year. In that period of time, they can lose 30 percent of their brightness. LED displays don’t suffer from the same decrease in vibrancy. Also, projectors still have difficulty displaying deeply saturated colors like blacks, and their contrast is not as great as that of LED displays.

We often run our Absen X5 LED panels at around 25% brightness! This just goes to show how much more power there is to be had in contrast, sharpness, and overall clarity. Also, because the panels we used are manufactured for outdoor use, they are weather and waterproof.

Here is our LED wall during the daytime for a live concert at a maximum of 45% brightness.

CUSTOMIZATION

If you’ve ever wanted to display different images or video in different size formats, you may have found that projection screens are troublesome due to their fixed size. With LED panels, you can build different sizes to your heart’s content.

We’ve built LED screen sizes in which projection screens simply don’t exist. Truss totems are a favorite of ours, providing background aesthetic and environmental texture to your event. From patterns and colors to large font text like drink menus, these can be built with a base plate, a stick of truss, and two panels per side, for a 3×8’ piece of LED art. Each panel measures 1’10”x1’8” so any combination of panels will work to provide you with a unique visual experience.

Here are our LED “totems” set to 10% brightness, in combination with projection screens at night.