What is an LED?
Light emitting diodes (LED) are special diodes that emit light when illuminated by the movement of electrons in the semi-conductor chips.

Advantages of LED Lighting
LED technology is quickly becoming tomorrow's primary light source and have several advantages over conventional light sources:

• LEDs for sign illumination are rated for continual use for up to 100,000 hours.
  
• LEDs radiate a "cold light", meaning they generate very little heat compared with other lighting technologies. This also means less wasted energy.
  
• LEDs are energy efficient meaning they consume less energy to produce brighter illuminated displays that creates much greater readability and flexibility of use than traditional signs and billboards,
  
• LEDs are manufactured in a full range of colors and with appropriate mixing schemes can generate billions of colors.
  
• LEDs are continually declining in price, making LED displays extremely affordable.

Terminology

Pixel
A pixel (short for picture element) is an image component of an LED display's overall resolution. The more pixels used to represent an image, the higher the resolution is to offer greater picture quality. In an LED display, a pixel can consist of 1 or more LED diodes. A monochrome or grayscale LED display pixel has 1 or more LED diodes of the same color. A color LED display pixel either has LED diodes of different colors or 1 single diode which contains semi-conductor chips that emits lights with different colors. Pitch
Pitch is the distance from the center of a pixel to the center of an adjacent pixel. Pitch is very important because for the same display area, the pitch determines the resolution of the display. For smaller, tighter pitches, you have more pixels per unit area thus a better resolution. Selecting the right pitch when you are purchasing an LED display may save you money as well as getting you the appropriate resolution for your particular application. Please feel free to contact your Global sales or tech rep to help you select the right pitch for your display!

Matrix Resolution
An LED display's matrix resolution represents how many pixels there is on the display. A display with a matrix resolution of 320 (h) by 480 (w) means it has 480 pixels from side to side and 320 from top to bottom. The higher the matrix resolution is, the better an image is represented on the display. As we discussed earlier, for a fixed display area, selecting a smaller pitch will increase the matrix resolution of the display which means better image quality.

RGB Display
Red, green and blue (RGB) are the 3 basic colors human eyes can perceive. By using an appropriate combination of red, green and blue intensities, many colors can be represented. An RGB display simply means it's a full color display. However, how many colors can be shown on an RGB display depends on many factors. Two of the most important factors are the input data signal quality and the display's color processing ability. For example, if the input video signal only has 8-bit of information per color, no matter how many colors your display controller can process, the display will only show 8 bits of shadings per color. Global's current full color display controller can process up to 16 bits of information per color, that's total of 281 trillion gamma corrected color levels. However, most of today's video input signals are less than 10 bits per color. Therefore the actual color depth showing on an Global LED display is only as good as the quality of the input signal.

NIT- Unit of Brightness
NIT is the brightness measurement unit the industry usually uses to calculate the brightness of an LED display. It is calculated as the following:

LED Diode Density
LED diode density is a good indicator for comparing LED display performance, given using similar spec LEDs. Just like your car's engine, more cylinders generally mean more power. More LED diodes per unit area generally means higher brightness thus better performance. Global's vision has always been helping its customers to build/increase their business. Because of this, Global has always been sacrificing its profit margin and using more LED diodes from only the best LED manufacturers to ensure our customers have the brightest attention grabbing advertising medium outside their business location. A low brightness, unreadable LED display will not help you increase your sales because it's less likely for your customers to notice and read what you have to say.

Degradation
Generally speaking, an LED diode will quickly lose about 20% of its initial brightness after the first 2000 hours of use. After that, the LED diode's brightness only degrades at a very slow and unnoticeable rate, until it dies at the generally estimated lifetime of 100k hours. This unique degradation curve is the result of the nature of semi-conductor chips. When shopping for an LED display, it is important to keep in mind that the manufacturer's claimed display brightness will drop about 20% after 2 to 3 months of operation.

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