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Las Vegas is an ideal destination to witness the pinnacle of display technologies in venues designed for energetic crowds to enjoy sports and entertainment. It should be no surprise to see the city again host the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES), where display manufacturers unveil their latest creations – often taking cues from the most eye-catching commercial technologies that are scaled and, frequently, improved for residential use.
Laser Projection
The laser has revolutionized commercial projection applications, producing bright and colorful imagery on a grand scale. Lamp-based projectors’ frequent and costly maintenance has only accelerated the transition to efficient and reliable laser-based designs. Laser-based video projection delivers best-in-class image quality for cinema applications and impressively epic projection mapping installations, transforming the appearance of sports stadiums, landmark structures, and entertainment venues worldwide.
Symphony projection mapping exhibit – MuseumX, South Korea
One aspect of commercial laser projection influencing consumer-orientated products is increasing brightness to mitigate picture degradation due to ambient light. On the CES 2025 show floor at the Hisense booth was a demonstration of the company’s new L9Q TriChroma Laser TV ultra-short throw (UST) projector. Due later this year, the L9Q’s three-color laser emitters boast up to 5000 lumens of light output, deliver a 5000:1 contrast ratio, and can exceed the all-encompassing color palette of the BT.2020 color space available to HDR and Dolby Vision content authors. The L9Q demonstration on the busy and well-lit show floor produced 1500-nit peak highlights with a brightness-enhancing 2.9-gain screen – visually comparable to many upper-tier HDR televisions and easily mistaken as such when viewed in person.
Hisense LQ9 TriChroma Laser TV – image by Robert Heron
The LED Era
The humble light-emitting diode (LED) has become the go-to choice for efficient and long-lasting illumination of spaces in and around homes and businesses. For display systems, every LCD monitor and television sold today is backlit using arrays of LEDs. These backlight unit (BLU) arrays feature blue or white LEDs for use with quantum dot color converters or more traditional red, green, and blue (RGB) color filters, respectively.
TCL backlight unit evolution demonstration at CES 2025 – image by Robert Heron
New for 2025 was the introduction of LCD televisions using mini- or micro-sized RGB LEDs as a backlight system. Hisense and TCL had display units on the CES show floor, while Samsung revealed its prototype in a private meeting room. The claimed benefits of using an RGB LED backlight system included increased efficiency by better matching the BLU’s output to the video pixel’s color requirements. Also, the use of a color-producing backlight resulted in enhanced color saturation beyond what the current quantum dot or RGB-filtered LCD televisions can achieve today – Hisense claimed its upcoming flagship 116UX mini-LED TV with RGB LED local dimming can recreate up to a remarkable 97% of the BT.2020 color space.
Hisense 116-inch TriChroma LED TV (116UX) – image by Robert Heron
When LEDs are the Pixels
The display technology driving the full-color digital billboards frying the retinas of passing motorists and the supersized video screens providing close-up views in every sports arena is called direct-view LED. As the name implies, direct-view LED displays group RGB-colored LEDs to create individual pixels that comprise the imagery we see. The modular nature of direct-view LED displays allows for creating displays with non-standard shapes and curves and almost no size limitations. Modern direct-view LED displays’ combination of high performance and increasing pixel density make them an increasingly popular replacement for chromakey systems (AKA green screens) for the virtual backgrounds used in TV and movie production.
Ribbon-style and large format curved direct-view LED displays by Daktronics – Intuit Dome
Las Vegas has a modern temple of direct-view LED display technology, the Sphere. Its namesake exterior is a dynamic video display comprised of 1.23 million LED pucks spaced 8 inches apart, each containing 48 individual diode emitters – each puck effectively functions as a single pixel. Visible from miles away, day or night, the Sphere’s instantly iconic exterior is an impossible-to-ignore video display robust enough to tolerate the harsh desert heat.
The Sphere – Las Vegas
Enveloping the attendees inside the Sphere is a 160,000-square-foot (15,000-square-meter) wrap-around direct-view LED screen featuring 19,000 by 13,500-pixel resolution – the pixel equivalent of 31 4K televisions. Sphere’s exterior and interior LED pixel systems require significant video processing power using a networked array of 150 Nvidia RTX A6000 graphics processing units. During operation, the Sphere can need a peak load of up to 28 megawatts to power the facility – with more than half of that power planned to be provided by a solar energy and battery storage complex that has yet to start construction.
LED pucks on the exterior of the Sphere – image by Y2kcrazyjoker4
The ability to scale direct-view LED display technology to almost any practical size encourages unique consumer entertainment applications. One company providing genuinely immersive viewing experiences to its customers is Cosm. Currently, with locations in Los Angeles and Dallas, Cosm’s stadium-like venues feature a view-filling 27-meter (~88-foot) diameter concave-shaped direct-view LED display that provides an effective 12K video resolution. Featuring artistic and educational-related presentations, Cosm also has deals with major sports organizations, including the NBA and NFL, to produce and distribute select games. Cosm provides cameras and video processing technology at these sports events to deliver a “like you are there” live 8K presentation that customers can enjoy from their facilities.
Cosm “Shared Reality” venue
LEDs for the (well-heeled) Masses
The colorfully brilliant output of direct-view LED displays earns its desirable status for its robustness, high performance, and ability to scale to practically any size a budget permits. The challenges of bringing this technology into a residential environment are related to pixel density. An LED billboard on the side of the road viewed from a hundred feet away may produce a seamless-looking image with a pixel pitch (spacing between each pixel) in the 8 mm to 20 mm range. So-called micro-LED displays designed to offer large format “video walls” that appear seamless at relatively close viewing distances currently feature pixel pitches in the 0.6 mm – 1.5 mm range.
Digital Billboard – image by Robert Heron
On the CES 2025 show floor, Hisense unveiled a 136-inch 4K micro-LED display (136MX) due later this year with a calculated pixel pitch of 0.78 mm. Considering that every pixel comprises three (RGB) subpixels, we’re talking about tiny light-emitting devices manufactured using semiconductor techniques, binned for color and brightness consistency, and accurately placed within a sub-module grouped into a larger assembly. Micro-LED displays can deliver the perfect contrast of an OLED TV, the brightness and longevity of the best LCD TVs, and color saturation rivaling that of the best laser projectors. That said, micro-LED remains an expensive option for a supersized video display – albeit one with few practical size limitations. Compared to the six-figure price tag of the 146-inch 4K The Wall All-in-One from Samsung, Hisense (and others) is looking to get its micro-LED technology into customers’ hands for a five-digit cost – still relatively expensive but a fraction of the price of similarly sized current options for a 4K resolution (or greater) display.
Hisense 136MX Micro-LED TV – image by Robert Heron
A Bright Outlook
2025 is already looking to be a fantastic year for display development. Laser and LED light sources make some of the most inspiring and visually pleasing commercial-grade eye candy that practically everyone can experience today. Seeing these technologies enable new upgrades for consumer-grade gear that offers improved performance and longevity will benefit every home theater aficionado – even if today’s prices for some of it are beyond the typical household budget.
Robert is a technologist with over 20 years of experience testing and evaluating consumer electronics devices, primarily focusing on commercial and home theater equipment.
Robert's expertise as an audio-visual professional derives from testing and reviewing hundreds of related products, managing a successful AV test lab, and maintaining continuous education and certifications through organizations such as CEDIA, the Imaging Science Foundation (ISF), and THX.
More recently, Robert has specialized in analyzing audio and video display systems, offering comprehensive feedback, and implementing corrective measures per industry standards. He aims to deliver an experience that reflects the artists' intent and provides coworkers and the public with clear, insightful product information.
- Robert Heronhttps://www.avnation.tv/author/robert-heron/
- Robert Heronhttps://www.avnation.tv/author/robert-heron/
- Robert Heronhttps://www.avnation.tv/author/robert-heron/
- Robert Heronhttps://www.avnation.tv/author/robert-heron/
