Rental LED screens

Editor - Dimitry Scherbinin
Chief editor - Vladimir Krylov
Deputy chief editor - Michael Nikoulichev
30.11.2008

Large LED screens are heavy products, they were initially designed to be stationary. However, the moment LED screen became full-color, profit-oriented advertisers decided to use them during short events like shows, concerts, exhibitions, political rallies and such.

So, a new type of LED screens was developed that were called rental screens. These must be easy to assemble and carry which involves specific engineering solutions. This article is devoted to a short survey of rental screens, the ways they are used and maintained.


Large rental LED screen assembled for the concert show on stage (Photo credit: www.screens.ru)	Rental LED screen at the Red Square (Moscow) set up for a soccer match during May holiday (Photo credit: www.screens.ru)

Early in 2001-03, a Hong-Kong based company Lighthouse was one of the first to explore this new market territory. For rental LED screens Lighthouse started to use metal cabinets with the 20 mm pixel pitch.


Rental screen at the Red Square (Moscow) (rear view) (Photo credit: www.screens.ru)	20 mm pixel pitch cabinet for rental LED screen (Photo credit: www.screens.ru)

The author of this article had a chance to lift these rental cabinets on occasion and remembers that they did not suit the name of the company (Lighthouse), because they were nowhere light – in 2003 the cabinet weighed 100 kg. Luckily enough, the technology moved forward fast and the weight of metal cabinets dropped significantly. Today, rental companies demand that individual cabinets weigh within 30 kg.

LED panel mounting
(Photo credit: www.screens.ru)

One of the traditional and typical solutions for a rental LED screen in the utilization of stage metal supports. Reliable, convenient and easy to assemble…

Later engineers proposed to use frame structure instead of cabinets to further reduce the weight. In this case, individual modules are assembled on a light aluminum frame into LED panels of about 1 sq. meter each. This is the approach suggested by the Russian manufacturer “ATV Outdoor Systems”. LED panels are easy to transport and assemble which makes this type of rental LED screen quite popular among the rental companies.


Rental LED screen set up for holidays in Saransk (Russia) (Photo credit: www.screens.ru)	Rental LED screen set up outdoor for a small city celebrations (Photo credit: www.screens.ru)


Rental screen set up outdoor during a rock festival in Voronezh (south Russia) (Photo credit: www.screens.ru)	The LED curtains hanging as seven strips to decorate the world-famous Moscow circus (Photo credit: www.screens.ru)

However, for some applications even frame LED structures are too heavy. Therefore, where weight becomes a deciding factor in using the LED screen, customers prefer to use the new type of structure, namely, LED curtains. These are see-through LED modules, which weigh about 2-3 times less than the standard LED module.


The LED curtain during a factory testing (Photo credit: www.screens.ru)	Easy to use, light and water-resistant connectors used for the LED curtain (Photo credit: www.screens.ru)

For some outdoor events when time for assembly is limited to minutes and where organizers wish to save on setting up stage and screen support, they call in the “screen-on-wheels” companies that mount LED screens on a truck. There are numerous modifications of such mobile LED screens, some of them we can show here. We have already wrote about mobile LED screens in our magazine.


Mobile LED screen (Photo credit: www.tcigroup.co.uk)	Mobile LED screen (Photo credit: www.visibledisplay.com)

We should mention that today a lot of producer groups that arrange tours of famous singers and bands cannot do without rental LED screens. The leaders of the rental screen business have a lot to offer for advertisers. For example, Barco designed a special LED screen for the tour of the British singer George Michael (our magazine wrote about this event recently).

Let’s hope that fast development in the LED technologies will lead to advances in quality of rental LED screens to make them user-friendly and fun to watch.