Sign and Digital Graphics By Staff Writer November 1, 2016
This week’s Video of the Week has actually been featured in Sign & Digital Graphics before, although not in such visual fashion. As the man says, when you’re putting up a billboard in New York City’s Times Square, “you have to go big if you want to get noticed.”
That’s exactly what the parent company of the 1,900-room Marriott Marquis decided to do to celebrate the hotel’s 30th anniversary in 2015. The year before-just in time for the holiday shopping season-construction was completed on a billboard sitting atop the hotel that is roughly the size of a football field. Built by the Mitsubishi Electric Corp., the Diamond Vision AVL-ODT10 screen is 78′ high x 330′ long, or 25,610 square feet. Its screen uses nearly 24 million individual pixels, equating to pixel density of 2,368 x 10,048.
The remarkable clarity results from Mitsubishi’s proprietary “Real Black” LED technology. Using a 3-in-1 surface mount configuration, black LEDs are used instead of the traditional red, green and blue “lamp” style LED products or the standard surface-mount products that use white LEDs. Mitsubishi claims that its Real Black LED technology is the most significant advancement in large-scale outdoor display technology since cathode ray tubes were displaced by LED diodes in the 1990s.
Situated in the middle of one of the most visually arresting locations on Earth, this digital billboard truly does cut through the clutter and jump out at the tourists.