If you've ever been to a sporting event or concert, you've undoubtedly enjoyed watching
an instant replay or an awkward kiss on a Jumbotron. And if you're a great big nerd,
like me, you've probably wondered how exactly they make those things.
Great question, fellow nerd. Because they're engineered to be so massive, Jumbotrons are not
just super-sized versions of the kind of TV that you would find at the local Walmart,
and they are in fact built quite differently than regular TVs or monitors.
To find out how, we reached out to some manufacturers of these displays and ended up
hearing back from Daktronics, who weren't able to tell us any proprietary information,
but definitely helped us out. So, early Jumbotrons from the 1980s used cathode ray tubes or CRTs,
similar to what you'd find in old-school home televisions. But, unlike normal TVs,
which used only one cathode ray tube, these Jumbotrons had many of them,
with each one only being responsible for a handful of pixels instead of the thousands
of pixels that were produced by standard TVs at the time. This meant that early on,
even large Jumbotrons had pitifully low resolution. In fact, one early Jumbotron model with a diagonal
size of 30 feet had a resolution of 240 by 192 pixels. That's well below even a VHS tape,
not to mention that it was extremely heavy and thick,
making mounting it above an arena very difficult. Oh yeah, and it consumed thousands of watts of
power. Now, one intermediary solution was to use plasma displays, but they too had issues with weight,
and they were prohibitively expensive. Now, in hindsight, the solution to all of these
problems seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? Why don't you use lightweight, cost-effective, compact,
red, green, and blue LEDs? Then you can have your full-spectrum color cake and eat it too.
But unfortunately, blue and green LEDs, particularly bright ones, were much more
complicated to manufacture back then due to complexities with the required chemicals.
Now today, those problems are mostly solved, and most Jumbotrons work by using exactly that
principle. So, they'll have one LED module per pixel, with each module containing proprietary
wiring, so not like an HDMI connection, and then a number of red, blue, and green LEDs along with
a certain amount of video processing hardware depending on the manufacturer in order to make
fine adjustments to the image quality. Now, some screens use through-hole LEDs with reflector cups.
This makes them brighter and helps them deflect sunlight for outdoor and long-distance applications.
Others use surface-mounted LEDs without the reflector cups giving them better viewing angles
for places that don't have to contend with the sun, like indoor arenas for instance.
These modules then can be up to several centimeters across for larger screens,
meaning that at typical HD resolutions, modern Jumbotrons actually end up being really big,
which they can get away with because most of the viewers will be sitting far enough away from the
screen for the picture to still look pretty darn sharp. Many venues are actually more interested
in upgrading their Jumbotrons to HDR versus 4K, because at typical viewing distances,
greater contrast and dynamic range is believed to make a bigger difference to the perceived
image quality. But back to talking about size. The largest indoor Jumbotron covers nearly
65,000 square feet. It can be found in Atlanta at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and its ring shape is a
great example of how the modular construction of modern Jumbotrons out of these little LED modules
can make them highly customizable. But being huge and modular aren't the only ways that
Jumbotrons are different from smaller screens. They're also driven differently from an entire
control room that has to have equipment powerful and flexible enough to change what's on the screen
quickly and accurately, depending on the display's aspect ratio. Hence all the little buttons that
you see on a typical Jumbotron control board. This enables the right camera feed or visual
effect to be displayed at the right time. And because Jumbotrons have to be visible from far away,
as well as in bright outdoor conditions, their brightness goes far beyond what you'd see on
a regular display. It's not uncommon, in fact, for Jumbotrons to have thousands of nits of available
brightness, like the scoreboard at TIAA Bank in Jacksonville, Florida, which can get up to 9,000
nits. To put that in perspective, the average home TV will output around 300 nits, with a fancy
HDR home TV doing about a thousand nits and change. So this requires a special grade of LED
that can even require special cooling due to its immense power draw. Even though modern
LED-based Jumbotrons are much more power efficient than 80s and 90s technology, the screens are still
notorious power hogs due to their sheer size. The well-publicized sideline displays at AT&T
Stadium outside Dallas each require 635,000 watts of power. That's roughly a thousand times more
than an average gaming PC. Good thing that Jerry Jones still has enough money to pay for that power
bill. So thanks for watching guys, like, dislike, check out our other videos, and leave a comment
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