This article was originally published by Digital Audio-Visual Engineering Network (DAV) and is reproduced here. Author: Xu Ziliang.
Standards have always been scarce in the LED display industry. Basic national standards exist, but at the level of an actual product the market is still divided.
Why Standards Never Settled
On one side, manufacturers could not agree. Early LED volumes were low and most companies set their specifications around the long tail of individual customer requirements. The sector had many participants and few leaders, so nobody was in a position to lead on standardisation.
On the other side, the applications expanded faster than the products could adapt. LED was an outdoor medium for most of its history. As technology improved and new sectors appeared, it moved indoors, and the move demanded a different set of fixed parameters: size, resolution, interface.
The underlying reason is simpler than either: the industry did not think in terms of products. It thought in terms of projects.
The Bet Made in 2014
In 2014 the AET research team proposed that LED display should be able to standardise its architecture. The proposal came out of the disorder of the time.
For a manufacturer, staying non-standard means repeating the whole customisation process for every new field entered. That slows iteration, and it leaves a stock of products that cannot be sold anywhere else if the target market turns down.
The alternative is to design one product systematically, for general use, in advance. Several companies may have considered the shift from custom to standard; AET committed to it earlier and pushed it further.
Work began in 2014. Over the same period LED architecture itself moved: interfaces and cables simplified, module thickness fell. AET’s design work ran with that current rather than against it.
The Three Standards of the AT Series
The AT series is the clearest product of that line of work, and it can be read through three fixed parameters.
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Standard size The first full-colour direct-view LED display specified in inches, the international unit for display size: 43, 46, 55, 60 and 70 inch, with mounting holes matching LCD practice so an AT unit can replace an LCD cabin.
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Standard resolution A 16:9 cabinet across the range, with 1K, 2K, 4K and 8K standard display supported without rescaling.
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Standard interface Modular HDMI input, replacing the screen-processor-sending-box-computer chain with a direct screen-to-computer connection: no processor, automatic linking up to 2K, plug in and display.
Why Indoor Use Needed the LCD Comparison
Indoor display was LCD territory, and LCD’s advantage was that it had standard sizes. LED could go indoors technically but arrived in whatever dimensions the project required, which made it hard to specify and hard to compare. Fixing the inch and the 16:9 ratio is what made LED an indoor option rather than an indoor exception.
The Gala as a Test
The three standards did not only open commercial space. They put the product on a national stage.
CCTV has been adding VR, XR and holographic projection to the Spring Festival Gala for several years. In 2023 the broadcast included its first 8K ultra-high-definition transmission. The main LED screen was AET’s QCOB AT standard unit at P1.8, each unit at 1K or 2K standard resolution, assembled directly into an 8K-plus wall.
Conclusion
Where LED ends up is not settled. But moving the product towards standardisation has become one of the industry’s directions of travel, and the AT series is the clearest working example of it: it widened the range of applications without changing what the product is.
AT Series
Contact AET for the standard size list, resolution options and interface configuration.
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