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Indoor signs are bright enough to be seen inside a building under commercial lighting, but not bright enough to be seen in direct sunlight. Outdoor signs can be seen in full-on, mid-day sunlight, and are weatherproof to withstand the harsh environmental conditions. Sometimes, people choose an outdoor sign for INSIDE a building if they want the display to be seen from the street. Characters Per Line vs. Lines per Sign What do you want your message to say? How many words do you need on the screen? Write down samples of what you want to program into your sign, and actually count the letters. As a basic rule of thumb, you will need a height of 8 pixels for every line of text, and a width of 6 pixels for every character. An 8 x 96 matrix LED sign will display 1 line with 16 characters. Of course, the sign will scroll, so you don't need ALL of the letters on screen at once! Also consider that you may need more than one line of text for your message. Viewing Distance How far away is your viewing audience? Are they in their car driving fast on the freeway, or are they strolling casually past your store sipping a latte? The distance that your audience is from the sign determines the size that your characters will need to be in order for the text to be legible. A good rule of thumb is that a minimum of 1 inch of character height is needed for every 25 feet of distance. For example, a sign 100 feet away from the audience will need text at least 4 inches tall. Text vs. Graphics If you are looking for a simple, easy-to-program, text-only sign, there are plenty of scrolling monochrome and full color models to choose from. If you want full motion graphic animations in addition to scrolling text, then you have to have some method to create the animated content for your display (mono or full RGB). MultimediaLED signs provide a variety of easy-to-use programs that allow you to import graphic animations (or even create them by yourself) in our software. Graphics can be as simple as importing a JPEG or as complex as creating your own custom AVI files. Color vs. Monochrome How many colors do you need? Monochrome signs come in red or amber, and can display up to 256 shades of one color (see Nova). Some custom colors are available, including blue, green, and white. Full color LED signs, also known as RGB displays, are capable of displaying a full range of colors just like a video screen. High definition RGB displays are capable of displaying up to 4.4 trillion colors! Viewing Angle vs. Brightness Viewing Angle is measured in degrees. The wider the angle, the wider the area is that a viewer can read the sign. A LED sign with a 50 degree horizontal viewing angle can be seen at up to a 50 degree angle to either side of the sign. Typically, the higher the viewing angle, the lower the brightness. Most indoor signs can have a very wide viewing angle of up to 140 degrees, but they tend to be less bright than an outdoor signs. A good roadside or freeway sign should have a wide viewing angle of around 70-110 degrees to give the maximum brightness and the maximum viewing angle. If a sign is only visible from a narrow street, then a narrow viewing angle is acceptable - the trade-off is brighter diodes. What pitch? What resolution? What size? Resolution refers to the number of LED pixels. A pixel can be made up of one LED or a cluster of 3, 4, 6, or more. Pitch is the distance between the center of one pixel to another. The smaller the pitch, the closer the LED pixels; therefore, the resolution of the display is higher. Video vs. Graphics Do you need graphics or video? Most graphic signs require a looping or repetitive animation sequence to be scheduled and played back on the sign over and over again. These schedules are created using a graphic animation file: usually AVI files. The graphic animation files are stored in the memory of the computer processor that runs the sign. Video usually implies a live video feed as in a sports or entertainment event. In this case, a video camera or other video source is input directly to the processor, and is then displayed by the LEDs. You can add live video to most MultimediaLED displays by adding a video capture card kit. |