European LED Mountain

Eurovision Song Contest. Spectacular, pointless, unwatchable, unmissable. All of those things.

Whatever.

The headline statistic for me was that thirty percent of the world's LED screens were used in the stage set.

That's a dubious statistic if ever I've heard one.

But even if there's a small element of truth in it, it sheds some insightful light on the LED video screen industry as a whole. Which is that it's obviously very small in comparison with other industries. If that was a third of its cumulative output in Moscow, then three times that number isn't very big.

And that's not surprising, because they're still very expensive, and will probably continue to be despite diminishing component costs.

The problem for LED screens is that customers demand higher resolutions, and in order to achieve, say, a six millimetre pitch (that's the distance between the LEDs) rather than a twelve millimetre one, you don't just have to double the number of LEDs - you have to square the number, because you're talking about an area rather than a linear dimension.

LEDs aren't the only components, but they're one of the most expensive. And they draw a lot of power. All of which is to say that LEDs aren't an ideal technology for outdoor large-scale video, but they're the best we've got at the moment.