This has been shining in my eyes for the last 10 minutes whilst the bus driver takes a break.
Technical education opens doors, or your child.
Please don’t open my child.
Why you gotta ruin it for us?
Alternate question: How powerful of a laser do you need to burn out the LEDs on those sort of displays?
I saw one of those big rig trucks where the trailer was completely covered in LED advertising displays, on the left, right and back.
One of the ads was regarding broken phones, saying something along the lines of ‘broken glass is a good thing’. Don’t quote me on the exact wording though, I only saw that ad once, but it was regarding trade-ins and upgrades.
Kinda ironic to have such an ad displayed on a truck where you’re tempted to bust their display with a sledgehammer…
They do need to be that bright at daytime, and most indeed use automatic brightness by default. If only there was a technology that could use daylight instead of fighting it…
They also don’t need to be visible, or exist at all for that matter. I despise ads.
Try going even one day without seeing a fucking ad…
First off, the only real way to accomplish that, aside from being in a coma, is to spend the day out in the woods somewhere.
Then, when you get tangled up in a thorny vine and pull out your knife, BAM, advertising logo!
Then when you want to start a fire, you bust out your lighter, and BAM, advertising logo!
This is in general for LED text signs. The “inventors” (more like engineers because they just combined multiplexing with superbright LEDs) OP mentioned probably didn’t specify a purpose, they just wanted a more reliable alternative to mechanical or manual signage but yes, most are for ads.
cons: significantly more expensive, don’t work in total darkness, don’t catch attention
They have an LED each in the top-right corner of the corresponding dot. The LEDs use different driving signals (much higher frequency and not just when the display changes) but are kept in sync with the slow-updating display to allow both technologies to complement each other: they do work in total darkness and faulty dots have LEDs as a fallback; the LEDs are half-brightness at night, full brightness at dusk and off in daylight.
Also, they were significantly LESS expensive than a sufficiently luminous LED display in the 90s before superbright LEDs existed.
As I said in another comment, they weren’t designed for ads but info signage, so they don’t actively catch attention, which is what you want to get a visually cleaner environment.