The history of film can be traced back to the late 19th century. At that time, movie projectors are the only option for playing movies, and are still the mainstream for cinemas and theaters. But the situation is changing since Samsung announced the world’s first cinema LED screen in 2017 at the Super S theater within the Lotte Cinema World Tower in South Korea. Since then, cinema LED screens are gradually expanding their application in cinemas and theaters due to their excellent performance in brightness, contrast, and color accuracy when compared with traditional movie projectors. Tough there are no clear data showing how many LED cinemas are operating worldwide, we still bear a strong believe that cinema LED screen would be the future of movie watching. Why? Let’s proceed to learn more about cinema LED screens.
A cinema LED screen is is a large, high-definition display utilizing LED pixels to directly create high quality images for movie watching, which is unlike the projecting system of a movie projector.
Cinema LED screens inherit all the advantages of LED pixels, such as low energy consumption, high brightness, high contrast, wide color gamut, and durability. These features can not be seen on a movie projector.
As mentioned in the previous section, cinema LED screens offer various advantages when compared with traditional projectors. Let’s proceed to the details.
Cinema LED screens are exceptional brighter than projectors, and often exceed 1,000 nits, can present clear and vibrant images even in well-lit environment, which is not possible with projectors.
And according to test, a cinema LED screen has 10 times higher brightness than a projector.
A cinema LED screen can achieve infinite contrast ratio with deep blacks and bright whites; but a projector can only reach a contrast ratio of 2500:1, which limits image quality a lot.
Cinema LED screen usually acquires DCI-P3 color gamut standard, which means a much wider color range and better color reproduction than a traditional movie projector.
Cinema LED screens can be customized to full HD, 4K, or even 8K ultra high resolution to produce images with exceptional clarity.
The best viewing angle of traditional projectors is limited to around 36 degrees while cinema LED screens can provide 120 degrees or even to 180 degrees viewing angle.
This means if you sit at the side of a movie theater, you can get a decreased experience with projectors. But with a cinema LED screen, this won’t affect your movie watching experience at all.
LEDs are well known for their reliability and durability. Cinema LED screens can operated for thousands of hours without visible decrease of image quality.
Cinema LED screens are composed of multiple LED panels. This means, cinema LED screens can be scaled to any different sizes you want. You can fit your cinema project by adding or reducing the volume of LED panels being used for the screen.
As a high definition display with superior color accuracy, cinema LED display is not limited to cinemas or theaters, but can be widely used in other sectors.
As mentioned above, cinema LED screens are more commonly used to display films in movie theaters. They produce excellent images with high brightness, contrast ratio, depth, and great color accuracy.
We can also see cinema LED screens appear at live events like concerts, ceremonies, sport competitions, etc. Especially in large events, cinema LED screens can be backdrops to show detailed information about the event, live video feeds, background scenes, and of course provide astonishing visual experience for t he event.
With wide color gamut and accurate color reproduction, cinema LED screens can also be applied in virtual production studios. They can create vivid scenes as the background of the film, and can response with the performance of the actors with preset programs. This makes cinema LED screens perfect for virtual production.
We can also see cinema LED screens at other application scenarios where need high quality images, such as theme parks, shopping malls, exhibition and convention halls, company meeting rooms, etc.
Kinglight P3 Color Gamut Series LEDs for cinema LED screen manufacturing
In the beginning, we already mentioned the first cinema LED screen in the world. So which one could be the largest cinema LED screen in the world?
Some reports said, on January 12, 2024, Timewaying Technology Co. Ltd unveiled the world’s largest 20-meter 4K DCI LED cinema at the Zhejiang Times Cinema in Hangzhou, China. The new screen, branded HeyLED PLF, supports high contrast, high brightness, and high dynamic range (HDR) screening technologies.
But in fact, there are a lot of cinema LED screens reaching 20 meters wide across China now, and the situation might be the same in the world too. It’s hard to tell exactly which one is the largest since there is not enough information about this question and LED displays have great scalability.
