Mitsubishi may take the lead sometime this year for what they say is the world’s largest high-definition (1080p) LED video display, a unique, four-sided scoreboard being built at Texas Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys. The center-hung structure consists of four DiamondVision video displays, with two main sideline displays measuring 72 feet high by 160 feet wide (2105" diagonal!) and two Diamond Vision end-zone displays measuring 29 feet high by 51 feet wide. It will be suspended 110 feet directly over the center of the playing surface and stretch from one 20-yard line to the other.

Challenging that claim, however, is what may be the world’s largest video display of any resolution, the overhead "half-pipe" of the Fremont Street Experience in downtown Las Vegas. Spanning 1,500 feet in length - the size of five football fields - Viva Vision’s projection surface contains 12.5 million synchronized LED lamps,

If I’ve kept track correctly (my readers will surely correct me if not), Panasonic takes the gargantuan lead of the largest plasma display, the 150" 4k x 2160 display unveiled last year. And Sharp may still have the lead for an LCD display, their 108" monster. Not to be outdone, Philips has announced their Cinema 21:9 HD display - the widest aspect ratio LCD. It will be available only in selected European countries, but sources tell me that distributors are none too pleased with having this pushed on them.

On the capture side, JVC recently showed their 4K video pro camera, capable of delivering a full-resolution video signal. And RED Digital, following on the heels of their wildly successful 4K RED ONE, have announced successor models capable of not only 4K @ 60 fps, but also 6K and even a mammoth 261-megapixel camera, producing 9,334 x 28,000 pixel capture at up to 30 frames per second!

So, how much of this largess is useful, and how much is just braggadocio? Certainly, the colossal outdoor displays serve a certain purpose, but for indoor use, the LCD and plasma behemoths may say more about deep pockets than it does about practical applications. For the most part, displays are manufactured by a handful of Pacific-rim countries and, for the right price, you can pretty much dictate the size you want.

The visual acuity of a person with 20/20 vision is such that the finest detail on a 1080p display can be discerned when the display is about 4 picture heights away; when testing HD displays, experts often use a "3-picture-height" distance in order to be even more critical. Bigger displays thus means pushing the display further back, assuming you don’t want to see the pixels. This pretty much sets the size limit for normal home viewing situations. And as for 21:9, well, that’s just plain silly - no further explanation needed.

As for image capture, more pixels certainly mean having more information to start with, and that should be, in principle, a good thing. But the practicality of film and video production dictates the most efficient work flow, and that gets constrained by hardware and cost. Manipulating a lot of pixels means high CPU demands, and the time needed to process images will tradeoff hardware cost vs. manpower cost; in the end, very high resolutions will be used in special cases, but an increasing amount of video capture will take place at 1080, with cinema slowly ramping up to 4K.

Big always makes for interesting headlines, but egos aside, money talks. Now how about the world’s smallest display…? -agc