Local Dimming Tech Reduces Praevar’s New High-Bright Display Power Demands By 35%

November 19, 2024 by Dave Haynes

Toronto-based specialty display company Praevar has launched a new high-brightness outdoor LCD display that uses dynamic local dimming backlight technology and software to reduce its energy consumption by roughly 35% over high-brights of the same size and spec on the market.

Praevar says its Podium 75-inch units can push 4,000 nits of brightness and run 4K while using just 200 watts of  energy.

“Our customers are increasingly challenged by the rising costs of energy, the difficulty of providing power to remote locations, and the growing demand for environmentally friendly solutions,” says CEO Ralph Idems.

Praevar mainly sells its outdoor totem and wall-mounted displays to out of home media companies, who arrange contracts or win tenders to put ad displays on sidewalks, transit shelters and in busy areas like airports and rail stations.

I had a long meeting with Praevar at its offices a few weeks ago, and Idems and his team went into their thinking and development, saying the keys were local dimming – only switching on sections of a screen’s backlight that needed it and leaving the dark areas of a visual off – and a chipset algorithm that optimizes power usage.

The display’s primary features …

• Local dimming with 200 zones, which optimizes contrast and enhance visual depth;
• 4K at 60Hz with 4,000 nits of brightness;
• High Temperature Optical Stack that prevents sagging and yellowing from extreme heat, ensuring long-term image quality;
• Advanced sensors for temperature and ambient light with auto-dimming features, plus options for particle and humidity sensors.

This may be obvious, but if not … reducing energy consumption is a big demand in Europe by media companies and, in some cases, different levels of government. In parts of the world where sustainability is not as much of an issue, like North America, 35% less power usage means substantially lower operating costs for media companies – something they do care about.

There are pushes – and I know companies like Praevar and Taiwan’s Dynascan are in active development – to use color e-paper for digital out of home displays. That tech’s ability to show color is MUCH improved in recent years, but it will not supplant high-bright LCD anytime soon because of high costs, decent but not great color reproduction, and no support for video.

All of this sort of thing will get covered in the giant future displays report I have been buried in for the last quarter. It comes out in mid-January, ahead of ISE.