It’s reported that only one existing technology that can be tapped to display images large enough for arena use and are viewable even in direct sunlight: the LED.
Building humongous panels is very difficult. Today, to go larger than that, special production equipment would have to be developed. Projection technology might seem like a solution, but it's not. Indoors, front-projection is feasible. But in big, enclosed arenas such as those at the Beijing Olympics, the presence of competing light sources tends to dull the projected images. Naturally, things get even worse for a front projector in an outdoor stadium.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. is installing its LED Astrovision technology in China. The Japanese consumer electronics giant will supply the Beijing Games with 25 LED Astrovision video display screens, delivering a total of almost 4,000ft².
it's easy to increase the brightness is one advantage of the LED, a self-emitting diode, is that. Astrovision's luminance is as high as 5,000cd/m²; the brightest PDP can offer only 1,600cd/m². And the Astrovision panels are not flat, so slanting sunlight is deflected to the ground and away from the audience. A display installed in an arena must be able to deliver excellent images to the audience regardless of where they sit. Here too, LED displays have advantages.
An Astrovision screen consists of as many as 1,728 LED units, snapped into a metal latticework frame. Each unit contains a layer of LEDs in a grid of red, blue and green diodes placed at 8mm intervals. When the screen is viewed from a distance of 3m, three primary-color diodes, driven together, blend to form what appears to be a full-color pixel, reproducing realistic images in vivid hues. Because each LED unit operates at 1.6kHz, it offers a very fast response time.
