BRISTOL, TN — The “Colossus” video display, suspended by cables attached to four giant, purpose-built towers outside the stadium at Bristol Motor Speedway, is being called the world’s largest outdoor center-hung video display. Each of the four panels on the display measure 30 by 63 feet (HxW), and each is comprised of 240 digiLED Toura6 6mm LED panels (24 x 10, WxH). Along with digLED, GoVision and Panasonic were involved in this project. The display will also feature prominently in the Battle of Bristol, which is expected to set a record as the biggest college football game ever when the University of Tennessee/Knoxville faces off against Virginia Tech on Sept. 10. Some 150,000 spectators are expected to attend.
More details from Macroblock, a Taiwan-based company whose product, the Macroblock MBI5041 16-channel S-PWM Constant Current LED driver, is used with each of the digiLED Toura6 LED panels (www.mblock.com.tw):
Throughout the year, NASCAR races, college football games and other live events are hosted at the venue and televised for international audiences, often with the digiLED screens playing a key role, live on camera. Therefore, all video displays in the stadium will require high visual performance for HD and 4K broadcast purposes. Each Colossus video screen display boasts an 87 percent greater resolution than HD and is cumulatively more than 8K in width.
“The four vast faces of digiLED Toura6 panels for BMS will generally be used outdoors in full sunlight conditions but are also required to have excellent video quality when used at night,” explains Tom Mudd, technical director at digiLED. “We therefore needed a driver IC equipped with the current gain function that helps avoid the problems associated with grayscale degradation at low brightness. That is why digiLED regards Macroblock MBI5041 as the best solution.”
Robert Chen, general manager, Macroblock, says “choosing high price /performance MBI5041 is also a choice of high reliability in the BMS case. This is because those screens are suspended 60 meters above the center of the BMS, and increase challenges of repairment or replacement. Besides, digiLED also cares chip to chip current deviations, preventing from poor visual performance resulting from current skew deviations.”
