Main Points to Know before Upgrading Your Outdoor Fixed LED Display!
Deciding when it’s time to upgrade your LED Display can be tough. After all, you want to get as much use as possible out of your investment. But even the best displays don’t last forever. It’s important to consider upgrading your LED display to not only remain competitive and compliant, but also to avoid having to use more power to keep it running. With a newer setup, you can ensure lower energy costs and worry less about downtime.
So, how are you supposed to know when it’s time to replace your display? Here are some common signs it might be time to upgrade.
1. Common Signals of Upgrading Outdoor Fixed LED Display
The PCB’s age
The average board lifespan is between 7 and 10 years. Though PCB can last much longer than the average time, when you exceed that age range is when problems start to arise.
Mechanical malfunction
- Degradation of brightness and consistency
- Failure of LED components
- Obsoleting of parts
Even with the best maintenance, boards are subject to mechanical issues and failure. Older displays, especially those outdoors, receive a lot of environmental wear and tear over the years. Sunlight fades and degrades individual diodes, decreasing display brightness and picture consistency. With an inconsistent picture, your display is less valuable to both you and your advertisers. And as with any aging product, parts can fail. When it happens, and without a warranty to replace or repair, those parts can be a big hit to your budget — if you can find obsolete parts at all.
Rising maintenance costs
Like it or not, the cost is always a contributing factor, and evaluating the LED display board cost of your current board versus an upgrade is another effective way to weigh your options. Some considerations include:
- How much does it cost to power your board?
- Are the parts for your board old or hard to locate?
- Will a warranty still cover repairs?
- How much ad revenue are you bringing in with your current setup?
- How does the manufacturer support the product after the warranty expires?
Aging boards require more power to run than newer setups — up to 80 percent more. That means higher operating costs in your budget.
Due to the increasing rate at which products become obsolete, it becomes more difficult and more expensive to replace broken parts. Older boards also attract fewer sponsors and advertisers than new boards with better picture quality.
Tech upgrades and industry standards
With rapid advancements in display technology, an upgrade may be necessary to stay competitive or compliant. Sometimes, technology evolves so much over time that businesses are forced to upgrade. Accelerated tech advancements and higher industry standards can take shape in a number of different ways, including:
- Smaller pixel pitch
- Brightness standards
- Space for growth
- Price reductions
- Safety and emissions standards
- Better uptime and color capability
Industry visual standards are always getting higher. Improvements are constantly being made to safety and emissions, and it’s crucial that your board meets advancing standards.
Pixel pitch has continued to decrease and brightness standards are also changing. Not long ago, 5,000 nits marked ideal brightness. These days, 7,500+ nits are the expectation.
On top of pixel pitch and brightness, the industry has come to expect additional capabilities like better uptime, cloud-based management, and HDR color, etc.
After taking all factors into consideration, and you are decided to upgrade your old outdoor Fixed LED Display, here are some main points for your reference.
2. Main Points for Upgrading Outdoor Fixed LED Display
A. Module
(1) Screw holes
In the case of upgrading old screens, customers often replace the original large pixel pitch with a smaller one. For example, using the outdoor LED display P4mm to replace the old P16mm one.
During this process, it should be noted that the dimension of the old P16 one is 256*256mm, and the new P4 one is 256*128mm, due to different sizes, kits and bottom cases, the screw holes of the two modules are not consistent.
In this case, if the customer decides to replace, the screw holes need to be re-drilled, and the water ingress problems that may be caused by re-drilling also need to be taken into consideration.
Usually, we will provide the size drawing or CAD drawing of our module for customers’ reference, which is convenient for customers to estimate the transformation.
(2) Spare parts
We usually recommend that customers who buy modules to replace old screens purchase about 5% more spare parts for emergencies.
If there is a problem with the screen in the subsequent use, without sufficient spare parts and buy another module to replace it, there may be problems such as inconsistent screen color and brightness, which will affect the display effect.
B. Receiving card
Another issue to consider when upgrading screens is: The adjustment of the pixel pitch causes the pixels of the entire screen to change, and the receiving card in use may not have enough load capacity and needs to add more or to be replaced.
For example, the total pixels of a 8*4 meters P16 screen is 500*250=125000 pixels, and change it to P4mm, the pixels will be 2000*1000=2000000 pixels, this is a huge difference.
In the situation of the current receiving cards still work normally but have been discontinued, we recommend customers to replace all receiving cards with the latest generation. Because the screen uses two different models of receiving cards at the same time, it will also cause problems such as inconsistent screen color, refresh rate, and brightness.
Same as the modules, we also recommend that you prepare more spare parts for the receiving card, because the control card upgrade very quickly, so ensure that there are enough spare parts in case that can be replaced after the production is discontinued.
C. Power supply
In addition to pixels, power consumption will also change during the screen upgrade process. So you’ll need to consider the replacement of power supply, too.
Take our modules for example, the power consumption of one outdoor P16 256*256mm module is 45W, and one outdoor P4 256*128mm modules is 30W.
One screen of 2.56*2.56 meters need 100pcs of P16 256*256mm modules, the total power consumption of the screen is 4500W, upgrade it with 200pcs of P4 256*128mm modules, the total power consumption will be 6000W.
When choosing a power supply model, you need to consider issues such as voltage (110V or 220V, or choose the 100V-240V wide input voltage power supply), climate (choose the model with cooling fan or heat conduction strip), and whether the size can match the existing cabinet, etc. We’ll send you the datasheet of the power supply recommended for you to have a full understanding of it.
3. Conclusion
You may have a concept about upgrading an outdoor fixed LED Display after reading this post.
Generally, we’ll make all the necessary calculating that including the quantity of modules, receiving cards, cables, etc. for our customers to update their old outdoor fixed LED display. If you have the plan to upgrade your screen, just feel free to contact us!
