The future of high-end cinema shines bright with LED, led by Chinese companies
The big picture: The upsides of going LED are tough to ignore. These displays offer drastically improved brightness and contrast ratios compared to even the top projectors, resulting in a more immersive, true-to-life viewing experience that puts the movie magic front and center. The only downside has been the massive upfront costs, but that’s changing, in part due to multiple Chinese companies.
An LED cinema screen revolution is slowly taking form, driven largely by aggressive moves from Chinese firms like China Film Global Technology Limited (CFGDC), Huaxia Leyard, QSTech, Unilumin, and Lopu. Numbers shared by LEDinside, as seen in a TrendForce report, are eye-popping. By the end of October, there were already over 50 LED cinema installations across China, with 30 of those set up this year alone.
However, Chinese manufacturers aren’t just focused on the domestic market anymore – they’re going global, taking advantage of policies from Beijing that encourage expanding into new markets. These markets have historically been dominated by players like Samsung and LG, who offer their Onyx and Miraclass lines. Now, TrendForce estimates that global LED installations will reach 160 units this year.
One of the first big overseas wins came when CFGDC revealed that a cinema in Dinkelsbühl, Germany installed 10 of its high-end Cinity LED projection systems, making it a fully LED theater. These projectors support 4K 120fps video, meet the DCI-P3 color standard, and can hit a significantly bright 87 foot-lamberts in 2D mode.
Leyard, another major LED screen firm, has its displays in over 20 international cinemas at this point, including theaters in France, the US, and Spain.
Another Chinese duo, a startup called Rio-tech in collaboration with Timewaying, installed what they’re calling the first HeyLED cinema screen in Europe at a theater in Romania earlier this year. This 2K screen has passed DCI certification.
Next up is Lopu, which is even working on transparent LED cinema screens. They say inquiries are already flowing in from “young overseas investors” looking to shake up the cinema experience. Then there’s Cineappo, which at the CinemaCon industry event in April, showed off its “VLED” cinema screen products to positive buzz.
All in all, TrendForce paints a very positive picture of this market, saying that while LED models currently claim just 0.5% penetration of the roughly 30,000 high-end cinema screens globally, there’s a huge scope for growth.
Image credit: Unilumin, Rio-tech
