How Much Do Louvers Affect LED Screen Contrast?

How Much Do Louvers Affect LED Screen Contrast?

What are louvers and why are they in front of your screen? These often-overlooked components are critical to a good image.

When assessing the manufacturing quality of a video display, contrast is a critical component. Contrast is basically the difference between the brightest white and the darkness of the screen –the measurement of light against dark. The darker a screen can display, the better the image. However, not everything in contrast is derived from the light emitting diodes.

A very large factor in the blackness of a display is the actual plastic that houses the LEDs. The blacker the plastic is behind the LED diodes, the better imagery is going to show up in the daytime. With a blacker background, not only can the images on the screen stand out more vividly and crisply, but also allow the screen to operate more effectively.

LED beads are held together in a plastic housing to protect them from moisture, weather, and other elements. Louvers, the ridges that shade each row of the LEDs, are a crucial part of the design of the housing. They are supposed to be as invisible as possible between the rows of pixels. To avoid unexpected ambient reflections, the louvers should be very black and very consistent in color.

In low-cost LED modules, the louvers are thick, rounded or poorly manufactured, which will result in light bouncing off the plastic surface into the viewer‘s eyes. This will eventually harm the contrast of an LED sign, making it dimmer and washed-out. Low end manufacturers will not pay such a high expense on louvers, and that will impact the contrast and overall image quality of the screen.

In Dakco, we truly understand the importance of the louvers. In addition to adding texture and painting the mask in black, we also extended the louvers to shade the LEDs from the sunlight to make the background as black as possible to cut down on ambient reflections.