The larger a purchase, the longer a customer likely expects it to last. Digital displays are precisely these sorts of large purchases, but too often customers only consider what they’ll be receiving right away. To return equivalent –or preferably, positive– value on the required initial investment, a digital display needs to be effective long past its purchase date. Ensuring continued performance from an LCD video wall or LED display demands an understanding of how, why, and when it might malfunction, along with built-in safeguards to quickly remedy these potential issues. Unfortunately, only one form of video wall technology is able to consistently guarantee long-term performance uniformity. This would be LED.
When your display solution is built from interchangeable and interlocking LED boards, you can plug a new one in at any time if an old one malfunctions for any reason. LED providers will often give customers a few spare boards ahead of time for precisely this purpose. This minimizes downtime and gives display owners peace of mind. It’s easy to relax when you know you’ve got a like-for-like replacement ready and waiting whenever you need it. This peace of mind is not granted to customers who opt for an LCD video wall.
Is Your LCD Video Wall Irreplaceable?
While portions of an LED display can be replaced like-for-like, that is often untrue for an LCD video wall. There are a few reasons for this. Individual LED boards are smaller and cheaper on a per unit basis than most all LCD display screens, which contributes to why LED customers often have spares lying around but LCD customers do not. That lets LED customers avoid waiting for replacements. In the event that an LED customer does have to order for a replacement, they are far more likely than an LCD customer to be able to actually get one. This is because LED manufacturers reliably continue to produce older display models, but LCD companies frequently do not. This is due in large part to the differences in lasting financial profitability of older LED and LCD solutions.
Earlier series of LED displays are less customizable and have larger pixel-pitches than their newer editions, but that sort of solution is still frequently the most appropriate in many cases. If you are a large retailer looking to energize your space with a big display audiences will see from a distance, an older, wider-pitched LED is probably the right call, even if newer LED models are available. This enduring viability of older models functions as something of an insurance policy for LED display customers; if a piece from an older model LED display malfunctions, it’s not an issue because the company still makes them. This is not often true in the world of LCD.
There are few environments where an old LCD display will be more appropriate than a newer model. LCD companies know this, so they sunset old models once the decided production run has been sold off. Nobody wants their old models. Nobody, that is, except the people who’ve already bought them. For these customers, there may be no recourse. If an older model LCD display in your videowall breaks down, you may not be able to replace it exactly. And if you can’t replace it exactly, did you really fix the problem? A mismatched videowall is a broken videowall, even if every display in it technically works as it’s supposed to.
LCD manufacturers sunset old display models. LED companies don’t. If you plan on keeping your large-format display solution around for a long time, you may want to take this into consideration. To investigate a few other discrepancies between LED and LCD suppliers, give us a call today!