Macroblock

The International Signs & Led Exhibition (ISLE), the iconic LED display exhibition in 2021, is held from May 10th to May 13th in Shenzhen, China. Every exhibitor shows off its latest and most outstanding products during the exhibition. Macroblock and Konica Minolta do not miss the visual feast.

At the ISLE 2021, visitors may realize that the virtual production is the upcoming trend in the LED display industry. The virtual production can be used in film production, broadcasting and event, etc. This trend also accelerates the growth of indoor 3D LED studio and opens up the new application.

Human eyes vs. camera
3D LED studio replaces blue/green screen with LED displays for virtual background. Its benefits include cutting post-production time and cost, providing immersive virtual environment and light source to improve acting, and reducing cost of props, physical movie and onsite shoots. However, adopting LED displays as the background is certainly a challenge for camera shooting. What human eyes see is often different from what the camera captures. Therefore, virtual production asks for an LED display with higher specification to cope with shooting requirements, such as high frame rate is necessary to keep the motion smooth, and a high refresh rate may avoid black scan lines, and bright and dark lines issues.

Virtual production needs high-end LED displays
Another key to the virtual production is to create an immersive environment. It indicates that LED displays should have high-quality visual performance, such as wide color range, HDR, etc. Achieving HDR, 16-bit visual performance is important. This is because when an LED display renders low brightness images, it could retain more image details instead of a dark and meaningless image. It is also close to the PQ curve to help restoring what the human eyes see and gain an immersive effect.

Breaking down the barrier between reality and imagination by 16-bit visual performance
Macroblock demonstrates an LED display cabinet with MBI5264 to present a 16-bit visual performance at Konica Minolta’s booth. Compared with common 14-bit visual performance solutions, the MBI5264 cabinet has four times grayscale levels that could bring a better picture quality at low grayscale with sophisticated details.  

Visitors may use Konica Minolta’s CA-VP427 to measure the LED display cabinet’s visual performance. The data is shown within seconds, that even when the lowest brightness level is as low as 0.05 nit, and the contrast level is still over 10,000. The high contrast ratio brings more realistic images with a quantified 16-bit immersive experience for viewers.

MBI5264 is embedded with "grayscale boost" and "PWM enhancement" functions to achieve 16-bit grayscale, 120 frame rate, and 7,680Hz visual refresh rate. It also improves most commonly seen display problems, for example, black scan lines, bright and dark lines, and flickers at low brightness. The recommended pixel pitch of MBI5264 is P1-P4 that is perfect for 3D LED studio and makes it a better visual experience.