LED Is Now A Mainstream Technology We’re excited to publish a guest blog by digital signage industry expert, Dave Haynes. Spectrio acquired Sixteen:Nine, of which Dave is the founding editor. Dave remains an unbiased industry expert and we’re honored to be able to dedicate our blog to his unique and impartial opinions. This blog covers his take on LED coming into the evolving digital signage space.To get more news about led video wall, you can visit htj-led.com official website. One of the core tactics for making a big visual impact with digital signage is to, well, go big with the displays. The rapid emergence of indoor LED technology in the last seven years or so has made it possible to fill entire physical spaces with seamless digital displays. But there’s steadily been a very tangible barrier to widespread adoption – high cost. When the first higher resolution indoor LED video walls came on the market, they were jaw-droppingly vast in scale and equally jaw-dropping in cost – as in $25,000 a square meter. So a big video wall in, let’s say, an Apple store, might have cost more than a million dollars to light up. Apple could afford that, but few other companies could. LED Is Officially Mainstream There are still super-premium new LED technologies on the market – like the microLED displays made by a small subset of display manufacturers – that are beyond the budgets of most businesses. But in broad terms, LED displays are now within the budgets of many to most businesses. I tend to describe this as LED displays being mainstreamed. Two big moments had me reaching this conclusion: First, when we all did things like business travel (I only kinda sorta miss that!), I would periodically go to Taipei, Hong Kong and China for trade shows and manufacturer tours. In those locales, you see big LED displays all over the place – not just for big advertising boards and on the feature walls of super-premium flagship stores. I was walking down one street in bustling Taipei and saw a football field-length, street-level LED acting as digital hoarding at a building renovation site; Second, as someone who writes daily about this business, I get a lot of press material from manufacturers and service providers. One of the notes that dropped into my cluttered inbox had to do with a sports bar in Green Bay, across from where the Packers play, that had installed a substantial, multi-sided fine pitch LED display above the horseshoe bar. Let that sink in – a bar in (otherwise) small city Wisconsin! I have since written about LEDs used as virtual, animated ceilings in shopping malls and office lobbies, as wall messaging in the parking garage (yes, the parking garage) of a Miami condo, and perhaps the craziest one – customer messaging inside an upscale car wash in Germany. Not in the lobby. IN the car wash! Those kinds of projects don’t happen unless costs come down to a level that it makes business sense – whether the return is in bar patrons ordering appetizers or motorists opting in on up-sold undercoating treatment in the car wash. It does not mean LED displays are now so inexpensive they can be used wherever but does mean end-users and solutions providers can stop ruling that option out in the ideation stage because they were always too expensive to seriously consider.