If you are a retail business owner, you must have been constantly thinking about one question: how to make the company stand out from the others on the streets. To make your store stand out from the others, you might need something more than a fixed store sign or a sign holder on the street.
After some research, you might find out there are two similar products that could draw attention from the pedestrians effectively: LED (Light-Emitting Diode) and LCD (Liquid Crystal Display). In Ireland, LCD seems to be a more common way of commercial display. However, considering the pros and cons, is LCD really a best choice for your business? This article talks about the difference between LED and LCD screens.
How do they work?
To understand which one suits your business better, you first need to know how does LED and LCD display work.
If we put electroluminescence into a sealed glass casing, we’ll be able to get a bright focus of light from a very small source. This is how LED works. On a LED panel, the program controls the light and moves of each pixel to emit lights. Companies can design the shape and size of each screen and put them together effortlessly.
(Left: 3D LED display made up of 512 individually-addressable LEDs inside of ping pong balls. Source: Hackster.)
On the other hand, LCD is more like a liquid panel that block light as programmed. When giving electricity, the particles on the filter layer will move to block & colour the lights.
Since the whole screen is a liquid crystal canvas, it is not easy to make the screen to a very large size. Additionally, similar like other canvases, LCD screens has margin along the edges.
(Right: A typical LCD display screen with margin on edges)
Advantage of LED (Compared to LCD)
As mentioned above, LCD now takes the dominant part of Irish market. Walking on streets, you can easily find out the LCD screens on your sides. But wait! Can you notice the difference from the two pictures below?
Left hand side is the picture taken on Camden street. Right hand side is the well-known street view of Time Square. The two pictures have shown the pros and cons of these two types of screens.
Installation
LCDs are compound screens from the manufacturers so people may consider it easy to install. However, for commercial users who’s in need of customise large size screens like outdoor billboard, this is clearly not the case. Since LED screen is made up by many pixels, each unit can be combined easily to make a seamless large screen.
Colours & Brightness
Honestly speaking, there is not much difference regards to the colour of the two screens. Two screens both have vivid colours that human eyes can’t really tell any difference.
What differs LED from LCD is the brightness. LED emits light itself. This means each pixel is a light source. By giving different voltage, the brightness can be controlled directly. LCD cannot emit light. It can only reflect and filter the background light source. Consequently, to brighten an LCD screen, the background light needs to be brightened first. No matter how hard you try, LCD still has that dim feeling when presenting images – it might be beneficial if you’re reading through Kindle, but impress the audience when they’re walking by? Not a wise choice.
Energy Saving
As mentioned above, LED screens emit light, LCD screens block light. In order to reach the same level of brightness, LCD consumes way more electricity than LED. More importantly, most of the energy consumed by LCD screen is not transformed into the display light, because the light is blocked at the background! As a result, for commercial use billboards, LED is a more energy saving choice.
Maintenance
A large piece of LED screen consists many smaller LED units. They are seamlessly combined to display the large picture. If one LED unit has a problem, all maintenance worker needs to do is to shut down the power, and exchange that tiny unit piece. All other units are not affected because they are in parallel connections with the broken unit. The maintenance cost of LED is very low.
The maintenance of LCD, on the contrary, is high. The whole screen is one big canvas, so even if there’s only one black spot on the corner of an LCD screen, the solution would still have to be changing the whole screen.
Image Display Quality
The image display quality of LED and LCD screen, if we compare, is like the image file of bitmap and JPEG. LED enlarge the image without the loss of sharpness. LCD not only has disadvantage on displaying moving projects, but also distorts images when the screen size is too large.
The maintenance of LCD, on the contrary, is high. The whole screen is one big canvas, so even if there’s only one black spot on the corner of an LCD screen, the solution would still have to be changing the whole screen.
Let Us Know What’s Your Choice
We believe, if you are looking for a display board that can promote your business, LED is a better choice than LCD.
LoEasy now has world’s best quality LED screens in all different types. We’re dedicated in providing the most suitable products to our customers. If you want to find out the best LED products for your business, please contact us.
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