Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark
00:04:21 · Ted Romanowitz, Morris Garrard, Dave Haynes
[00:04:21] S1: Yes. Well, I think it's this year was something between forty and fifty pages to cover the many, many different areas of our practices. But yeah, we think it adds value to our clients to see the latest and greatest, you know, what's happening and not just a reporting of, oh, this product announcement or that product announcement, but it provides the context of what's really happening, the undercurrents and the big stories, the technology transitions, if you will, that are happening that are driving shifts in the industry. So that kind of helps us open doors with clients to have the deeper engagements with them based on our unique insights. [00:05:11] S2: I think just to add to that as well is we don't produce these show reports solely for the benefit of our clients. We also work with an extensive research network that benefits from these show reports, as well as other industry bodies that we work with, like trade associations, for example, and our channel partners as well. [00:05:34] S0: And it's a way, obviously, that driving awareness of of the sort of work that you guys do and what what what is possible kind of behind the paywall. [00:05:46] S2: Exactly that. Yeah. It's a it's a brilliant opportunity to raise our profile and also to raise the profile of the analysts working within these product sectors as well.
00:05:46 · Morris Garrard, Dave Haynes
[00:05:46] S2: Exactly that. Yeah. It's a it's a brilliant opportunity to raise our profile and also to raise the profile of the analysts working within these product sectors as well. [00:05:54] S0: So we we're already four minutes in and I've got about half an hour to chat with you guys. So we should dive straight into some of what you saw and came away with. And I would say the the biggest thing is probably LED and in the context of Pro Display anyway, so we'll skip on past audio and some of those other areas. You talked a lot in the report about mass transfer chip on board. Can you, first of all, describe what that is? Because, you know, we're in an industry that's, you know, overwhelmed by acronyms and why that's important and what's the distinction? Why are you saying mass transferred when you're prefacing COB with mass transferred?
00:06:45 · Ted Romanowitz
[00:06:45] S1: Yes. And not only are there a lot of acronyms, Dave, but the problem is, is that terms are being misused Indeed. I've heard you talk about that a little bit, perhaps. But it's a really strategic inflection point that's happening right now, literally right in front of our very eyes at ISE, where you're shifting from packaged LED technologies that have driven the industry for twenty years. So where the LED red, blue, green are packaged and then picked and placed onto a PCB. Well, that's shifting to package list technologies where the individual chiplets, red, blue, green, are being mass transferred. So instead of one pixel at a time, they're doing thousands. And when you think about it in context, a four ks display is over 8,200,000 pixels. So if you can transfer thousands at once instead of one by one, you save a lot of time. And so this package list technologies like chip on board, where the backplane is a PCB and it's a passive driver and then chip on glass or what we call microLED, truly microLED, that is sub 100 microns mass transferred onto a TFT backplane with an active driver. So at ISE, you saw this crazy tidal wave, I'm going to go with that term, this crazy tidal wave of companies that are announcing COB. And the biggest thing is that they're coming to the fruition of manufacturing processes so that they can mass transfer instead of pick and place. So the cost is gonna be a lot less to make them. First of all, because you don't have to package first, then pick and place. And then secondly, because you can mass transfer. So we expect this is gonna, within maybe the next twelve months following, this could drive up to a 50% decrease in the ASP's average sales price of 1.5 millimeter and below. It's just truly amazing. You know, we've been hearing about this for several years. Futuresource has been writing about it and now it's happening right before our eyes.
00:09:31 · Dave Haynes, Ted Romanowitz
[00:09:31] S0: And with COB, there are other inherent advantages as well, right? I mean, the first one would be that as they're manufactured, they the finished modules have some sort of protective coating on them. That's just kind of fundamental to how they do them versus SMD. It's kind of the more the older school packaged LED displays where they're unprotected unless they've got this glue on board coating and therefore they're more prone to damage. [00:10:03] S1: Yes, exactly. And those processes have been kind of perfected over the last two to three years. So not only can you do a nice job of encapsulating it, but they can repair the LEDs as well, even after encapsulation. So that's a major thing that's happening. And one of the things that I saw at the show was i5LED actually had a double difficult display that they did in the sense that it's a corner, an inside corner, which is difficult to do with LED to get the, you know, so there's not any like seams or anything. But then the second thing they did is they put a touch overlay on an encapsulated COB display so you could touch. It had, you know, multi touch on it. So again, really, really interesting to see the future of what's happening. [00:11:06] S0: Yeah, because touch and LED were kind of different worlds for the longest time. And it's only been recently where you start to see IR frames around displays that that would make them interactive and you wouldn't want to touch a conventional SMB display because it was going to damage it, right?
00:11:06 · Dave Haynes, Ted Romanowitz
[00:11:06] S0: Yeah, because touch and LED were kind of different worlds for the longest time. And it's only been recently where you start to see IR frames around displays that that would make them interactive and you wouldn't want to touch a conventional SMB display because it was going to damage it, right? [00:11:25] S1: Exactly. Especially when you get to like 1.2 millimeter and below. The joke has always been you needed to put a little tray underneath the LED wall that you were touching to capture all of the LED pixels that were falling off. But once... [00:11:42] S0: Good Lord. [00:11:43] S1: I know, I know. Great visual, right? But now that's improved with all these new manufacturing techniques. [00:11:52] S0: Are there benefits as well to COB in terms of energy consumption or brightness, things like that?
00:11:52 · Dave Haynes, Ted Romanowitz
[00:11:52] S0: Are there benefits as well to COB in terms of energy consumption or brightness, things like that? [00:11:59] S1: The answer is yes. All the, you know, E all of the above. It's really incredible, you know, to see, you know, early in the LED market, you know, if you've got 600 nits or 800 nits, that was a lot. You know, now you're seeing indoor displays at, you know, 1,000 or 1,500 nits, which allows you to put them in a, you know, high ambient light situation like, you know, a room that has Florida ceiling windows like an office or an atrium or, you know, even in a store window or of course outdoors in a kind of a kiosk or a standalone LED display. The this package is like technology. You know, the chips are getting so small that you're filling in the space between the chips with an ultra black coloring covering. So, you know, that increases the contrast ratio and, you know, makes HDR content sing.