This fifth edition of the popular sign design series includes the winners of recent Signs of the Times contests: electric and commercial signs for retail shops, restaurants and bars, residential ...
You can't tune in an image that has too few lines of resolution.
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I’ve found myself laboring to describe the visual realities of pixel pitch, because resolution, sufficient resolution, is difficult to explain, especially to a first-time buyer. The preferences are subjective, and, often, the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Complicating this issue, new customers, usually, don’t comprehend the subject. They rudimentally imagine how they’ll use the display and how they want the image to appear, but no more.
Additionally, I’ve learned that buyers dislike fuzzy images, that is, excessive pixel pitch, but discount the relationship of pixel pitch to image resolution.
As part of a sales presentation, I recently demonstrated how different pixel pitches affect a full-color, LED-lamped display. This interesting, real-life exercise displayed differences nearly impossible to convey through words or photographs.
My customer had space limitations for the proposed, 8 x 16-ft. sign and, because cost upsurges as resolution (pixel pitch) increases, he wanted to see image-quality differences as the resolution changed. The demonstration helped him choose the lowest, acceptable image resolution for the best price.
As much as possible, our shop replicated the future sign’s features, assembled each demonstration board similarly, but with different pixel pitches between the lamps. We presented the four displays side-by-side, for simultaneous viewing from various distances. The pixel-pitch counts were 12.7, 16.5, 20 and 25mm, respectively. Table 1 displays a comparison chart for the 8 x 16-ft. display.
I displayed six still and six animated images on the four displays and positioned my customer at different viewing distances each time, so he could study the relative resolution. Complicating his decision was the cost vs. image quality — LEDs are a display’s highest-priced component — the tighter the pitch, the greater the sign cost.
For example, a 25 x 25-ft., LED-lamped display, using 25mm pixel pitch, would present 300 lines of resolution, or 90,000 total pixels. Such a sign could cost as much as $375,000 and produce excellent images for passengers in cars passing 200 ft. in the distance. The same sign size, with a lower pixel count, may cost $200,000, or, oppositely, at 12.75mm resolution, it could run up to $1 million dollars.
Cost compounding
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