ROE Visual has announced that the NEP Group, including European businesses Faber Audiovisuals and Creative Technology, have made a significant joint investment in the new Black Quartz outdoor LED panel.
The NEP Group has taken delivery of 3,000m2, making them the largest operator of this new and high-performance outdoor LED product. This volume will create a sufficiently large rental base to provide even the largest events with premium outdoor LED screens.
Being able to supply a large batch of matched, high-quality, and mechanically optimised outdoor LED panels within the NEP group has many advantages. It allows NEP’s global live events businesses to provide multiple large and perfectly matched screens across various event sites.
Graham Andrews, president of NEP’s Live Event division, commented: “This is a major strategic investment for our group and significantly expands our potential to deliver major LED projects on a global stage. While the investment is specifically to support a contracted project, this substantial boost to our world-wide inventory reinforces our position as the world’s leading provider of high-end LED facilities to major outdoor entertainment and sporting events.”
NEP’s Faber Audiovisuals division, based in the Netherlands, led the technical lead on this particular investment. Cees Jan Faber, CEO of Faber Audiovisuals, added: “We worked closely with the team at ROE Visual to refine the design of this exciting new product. Not only do ROE Visual provide the highest quality LED panels, but they also listen to our specific requirements and suggestions optimizing the mechanical and operational design to meet our demanding requirements.”
Publicly launched at ISE 2020, the screens were planned to feature on events and festivals throughout Europe in 2020; COVID delayed that. However, with confirmed contracts with both Faber Audiovisuals and CT UK and strong interest from other AV rental businesses, ROE Visual pushed ahead with production.
As Roelof Bouwman, General Manager for ROE Visual Europe, explained: “Building outdoor LED screens can be challenging. There are many extra factors to consider compared to an indoor LED screen, and we needed to make sure that we ticked all the boxes in the design. So, when ROE Visual set out to develop a new outdoor LED screen, we engaged fully with the NEP Group. For the panel and frame’s final development, feedback from their experienced LED technicians was combined with our expertise.”
The Black Quartz LED panels are fitted with an integrated wind-load resistant bracing system and boast a brightness of 5,000 nits. Brightness is essential in outdoor situations because you want to display your visuals even in bright sunlight. The Black Quartz LED panels have excellent visual performance due to Common Cathode technology and Black LED use. Its stable and brilliant LED performance results from a significantly reduced panel temperature and efficient heat dissipation. Using Black LED with 5,000 nit brightness, the Black Quartz LED panel sports a high contrast ratio and wide colour gamut.
The Black Quartz panels make use of HELIOS processing. The HELIOS LED processing platform is the result of close cooperation between ROE Visual and Megapixel VR. Offering 8K processing and HDR options, the processing platform HELIOS is a bonus feature for the Black Quartz LED panels.
Exclusively available for ROE Visual LED screens, a significant advantage for HELIOS is the dynamic colour gamut re-targeting capabilities. LED panels no longer need to be recalibrated to enable this function.
“The testing phase was crucial, Roelof continued: “Since not only the LEDs needed to be of excellent quality, we also have to take the structural integrity into account. Being able to provide full static calculations with the product is a must-have for professional use. You don’t want to risk audience safety”.
Once mounted, the LED panels are wind-load resistant and can be used on windspeeds of 20m/sec. The LED modules, power box, and receiving card are all mounted directly on the rigid frame, creating a fully integrated LED solution offering higher precision and less weight than conventional systems. The high precision frames are fitted with pixel pitches ranging from 3.9mm to 4.6mm and have integrated edge protection. The result is a seamless LED screen with an outstanding visual performance that can be used in almost any environment.
