LED Screens Direct is part of Peerboom Limited, a screen technology consulting and hardware supply company established by Andy Holmes in 2005.
Over the years we have been involved with many different image display technologies used in large format screens in shopping malls, information displays at transport hubs and through-window-onto- street screens that work in retail thoroughfares drawing customers into individual stores.
A brief history of our time.
Starting back in the 1980s in the USA, projection videowall screens were supplied to one of the world's first retail screen advertising businesses, Pioneer United Artists Mall Vision, based in Tampa Bay, Florida. 3 X 3 rear projection cube videowalls, with a screen diagonal of 120 inches, were installed in shopping mall food courts across the Eastern Seaboard of the US. The first site was in Tyrone Square Mall in St. Petersburg Beach, using Pioneer cubes, UA Cablevision's content delivery and LaserPoint image processing.
Soon after both glass CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) monitor and projection cube walls were installed in shopping malls and retail stores in the UK and across Europe.
With the advent of flat panel video monitors (plasma at first and then LCD) video walls got thinner and bigger but they still suffered from relatively low brightness so could only be used inside and away from direct sunlight.
Large format outdoor (sunlight viewable) screens used in sports stadia were hugely expensive and based upon technologies that were too low resolution for viewing at less than 50 - 100 meters, and had useable lifetimes measured in a few thousands of hours, so they were completely unsuitable for retail environments and transport hubs where the audience could be as close as a few meters away and the screens would need to run 12 + hours a day for many years.
Life gets a lot easier
Then the blue LED was invented. For decades red and green LEDs had existed, but in the 1990s the LED colour spectrum was completed by the introduction of the blue LED and now any colour was possible by mixing R,G & B. LED video screens had arrived.
When LED screens were introduced they were both an order of magnitude cheaper to buy and had an order of magnitude longer life than the old stadium displays, so they were a 100X more cost effective. The smaller size of the LED lamp also made it possible to build screens with much higher resolutions, so the audience could get to within a few meters of the screen and still see a clear picture rather than a block of flashing lights.
China gets involved
In the new Millennium, manufacture of this exciting new technology began to move from Japan, Europe and the US to China and this brought further savings to the costs of manufacture. Today China makes the vast majority of all LED screens that are sold worldwide with all of the best known (and most expensive) brands being built there.
LED Screens Direct taps into that manufacturing capacity to select the right balance of quality and cost to suit every budget and application.
Direct?
Most customers buy a complete product and have it installed by LED Screens Direct, but we can introduce the supplier to the customer if that is appropriate. If a large customer wants to buy a significant amount of LED screen product, we can arrange for this to be purchased directly from the Chinese manufacturer, and we will supply steelwork and installation or just consult on the client's needs if that is all they require.