Over the last two decades, congregations have engaged in worship through added visual elements during services. Eyes that once were focused down on a hymnal are now more often looking up at wall-projected content. Lately, many churches have decided to take this a step further by installing LED video walls in their sanctuaries. These video walls enable church leaders to share customized videos, images, and text (such as worship lyrics or scripture), live feeds, and other content.
REASON #1 – SURPRISINGLY AFFORDABLE
Costs for LED video walls have decreased substantially with up-front costs only 15-20% higher than projection. In addition, when a projector bulb or the entire projector fails, the replacement costs can be thousands of dollars each time. LED video walls are modular, so a panel or even a bulb can be swapped out at a much lower expense. As a result, the breakeven point of LED over Projection takes only one to two years.
What about LEDs vs LCD? For a LED video wall, the cost division line is 110 inches. For 110-inch video walls, LED video wall pricing is comparable to that of LCD displays. And for any video wall bigger than 180 inches, LED video wall pricing is absolutely better than any other static display technology.
REASON #2 – LOWER POWER CONSUMPTION
From a total cost of ownership perspective over the life of the system, LED video walls are superior to projectors and LCD displays and a wise investment of your congregation’s capital contributions.
Finally, LEDs consume 40%-50% less energy than projectors. And while doing so they can also emit significant heat.
When choosing a projection system, often you’ll focus on the upfront cost. But many churches spend thousands on electricity every month. The substantial savings realized by LED walls every month go right back into the budget of your congregation.
REASON #3 – WITH HIGH BRIGHTNESS AND HIGH CONTRAST
Traditional projection may lack the brightness in your space for easy reading and engagement. LED Wall images have a noticeably higher quality image.
While projection brightness is typically measured by Lux (the reflected or projected light), LED brightness, measured by nits, is the light strength directly from self-emitting diodes. One nits equal roughly 3.426 lux. While fine-pitch LED video wall brightness starts from 300 nits, it can also go all the way up to 800 nits, therefore it does not require a dark room and works well in applications even with ambient lighting conditions. If your worship space has ambient light at certain times of day, an LED video wall can be a superior solution.
You can improve the contrast ratio by either increasing black levels of the background or raising the brightness of white color. LED video walls can do both. LED video walls have a higher brightness than projection so the white color is brighter, and the screen itself of an LED wall is black as it uses black LEDs while projection is actually a white background in nature. Typically fine-pitch LED wall contrast ratio can reach up to 6000:1 whereas projector contrast ratio is 2000:1.
Another key figure is grayscale in low brightness conditions. LED walls can now handle 16-bit color depth processing and maintain a high gray level without compromising image quality even in low brightness conditions. Projected images, when in low-brightness conditions, may be blurry or look washed out when the light bulbs are over-burned. For your congregation, they can read lyrics, and scripture, and appreciate imagery better with LED video walls.
REASON #4 – LED VIDEO WALL WITH LONGER LIFETIME
LED walls have two to three times the lifespan of a projection setup. A projector’s lifespan is typically 3-5 years, and during its service life replacing light bulbs and lighting engines on a regular basis is typically required. LED video walls have a service life of 100,000 hours or 11.5 years. This is because projectors have a single passive source of lighting, meaning it’s one lighting bulb for the entire projection brightness. While LED video walls have millions of active self-emitting light sources, which burn evenly in a uniformed pace.
Based on the above 4 reasons, more and more churches install LED video walls to instead of the previous projector in nowadays!
Nicole Cao excerpt from Mr. Brian Harrison
E-mail: nicole.cao@besd-led.com
www.besd-led.com
