Guys Upstairs - Tech

Times Square will be getting an additional large billboard starting today. One Times Square is now occupied by Walgreens and they plan to market themselves to the best of their abilities. I must say that they will be achieving that goal very well as One Times Square is one of the most well known buildings in the world and is televised very frequently.

D3 LED, LLC is responsible for putting together the 340 foot high, 17,000 square foot sign that goes around three sides of the building. A total of 13 60-inch plasma displays and more than 12 million LEDs were used to create this massive billboard. The fascinating thing about the design is that the LEDs are spaced further apart the higher up on the building they are and at the street level the LEDs merge into the plasma displays that surround the store entrance. D3 LED is no newcomer to digital billboards - they have created numerous ones in Times Square, with a 7,880 square foot widescreen HD display for JVC going live Dec. 2 (it’ll only have 1.2 million LEDs).

The resolution of the display is supposedly 20 times that of a normal HDTV, and the color range exceeds normal TVs and even color printers. It will also be extremely bright for increased visibility - it produces 8,000 nits of brightness (1 nit = 1cd/m2) compared to the 200 of a normal LCD display. Behind the scenes of the display are 32 built in computers transmitting 150GB of uncompressed data every 30 seconds. The power bill for this will be huge since it consumes on average 250KW.

[NYTimes]