By Elijah Ebo, General Manager (Asia)
LED panels are made up of pixels, each having a combination of red, green, and blue sub-pixels. Mixing these together gives millions of colours ranging from black, when all the pixels are turned off, to white when they are all turned on.
With each pixel and sub-pixel behaving differently, panel calibration is performed to ensure the screen looks perfectly uniform.
The legacy method of calibration measures what each pixel can do in terms of brightness and colour, and for the sake of uniformity, limits every LED in that batch to a level determined by the weakest LED. This reduces the maximum overall brightness and is set for the life of the panel unless a lengthy and expensive recalibration process is performed.
Dynamic Calibration does things differently. It measures the capability of all the LEDs, but without setting a fixed threshold. This has huge benefits in terms of overall brightness and colour saturation and allows the user (or the system) to decide what they would like the colour targets to be for red, green and blue pixels, and also the overall brightness level on a pixel by pixel, frame-by-frame basis (system) or on a project-by-project basis (user). It also offers a readout of a panel’s capable colour gamut and displays whether a given pixel can hit the required colour targets.
Even as the LEDs degrade over time, with a dynamically calibrated screen, you can simply change the targets with a slider on the user interface of the processor. Recalibrating is now as simple as moving a slider.
Dynamic Calibration is particularly important for HDR (High Dynamic Range) enabled screens to make the most of every LED. For example, if you’ve got data coming in that says, ‘I’ve got the sun shining in this area and I need those LEDs to be super bright’, you need the raw power of the LEDs to achieve the right brightness. If you have already limited all of your LEDs with legacy calibration, it will be difficult to get the brightness, image depth and realism that is necessary to achieve brighter whites, higher contrast ratios, more saturated colours and true-to-life colour accuracy that helps to deliver exceptional visual storytelling.
To investigate what Dynamic Calibration could mean for you, check out our dedicated web page at Dynamic Calibration – Colour Processing For LED Video Panels (bromptontech.com) or contact support@bromptontech.com.