High Bright LCD Displays

For an LCD to be viewable outdoors in a bright environment, it needs to be extra bright. The LCD TV in your house is only designed for indoor viewing. If you move it outside it will look washed out and images will be difficult to distinguish. Not what you want for digital signage displaying advertising or other public content.

Brightness is measured in the unit cd/m² (candelas per meter squared), also known as “nits”. Your TV at home will be somewhere between 300 and 400 nits. For a LCD to be clearly viewable in an outdoor environment, it needs to be between 1500 and 2000 nits depending on the size and positioning of the display. In the picture below you can clearly see the difference between a standard brightness and high bright LCD. On the left is a standard TV display (350nits), on the right is a Metrospec X47i display (2000nits).

Picture: (left) 350nit CHEMI LCD (right) 2000nit Metrospec X47i High Bright LCD outside in full sunlight.

The CHEMI LCD on the left (350nits) looks to have terrible contrast because the sunlight defines the minimum black level, while conversely the high lumen output of Metrospec X47i on the right (2500nits) pushes the brightness of the highlights well above the minimum black level set by the sunlight reflecting off the display.

The backlight is a modern LCD display is made up of an array of LED’s. LED’s are much more efficient than the ancient incandescent bulbs or compact fluorescent lamps (CFL’s) they replaced, but they are still not terribly efficient. Only about 3% of the electrical energy is turned into light. The rest is given off as heat. 

Picture: The backlight inside a Metrospec X47i high bright LCD display.

High bright displays are specially engineered to handle the higher power needed to project more light. There is almost a linear relationship between the brightness and power consumption. A 1500nit display might be 4 times brighter than your TV at home, but it will also use about 4 times as much electricity, much of which is given off as heat.

To give you some feel for the magnitude of the numbers we are talking about here, the Metrospec X47i utilizes a 214watt backlight to achieve a brightness of 2000nits. If we assume an LED efficiency of 3% (that is, 3% of the energy used is turned into photons of light) then approximately 207 watts of heat energy will be produced by the backlight set at full brightness.

If you are concerned about your power bill, don’t worry. All Metrospec displays can be equipped with an optional light sensor that will automatically dim the display based on ambient light conditions, reducing energy consumption and running costs.

Hopefully you now have a better understanding of one of the key differences between a Metrospec display and what you might find in your local electronics outlet.

If you have any questions about our products or services, please drop us a line. Our sales team would be happy to help sales@metrospec.com.au or +61 7 3868 4255