FedExField Goes HD, Part 3: The JumboTron In Pieces
Posted by on March 26, 2010 – 11:17 amI had such hopes that the removed JumboTron would be sitting out in the concourse at FedExField, maybe hooked up to a cable box so I could sample The Price Is Right at thirty feet tall. I was right that it was sitting in the concourse, but it was in no shape to display any programming.
That’s the JumboTron.
I knew it wasn’t some sort of enormous cathode ray tube with a gigantic piece of glass in front of it, but I didn’t realize that it broke down into six hundred-ish pieces, each roughly the size of a shoebox. There are 24 of the things on each pallet, and there were 24 complete palette-loads in the concourse.
Each one of these modules is made up of smaller parts, which break down into smaller cells, each of which contains red, blue, and green LEDs (light emitting diodes). These LEDs essentially served the same function as pixels on a television: you adjust the primary colors to make up the enormous picture.
Oh, and for everyone who’s skeptical of calling the old screen a “Jumbotron,” click this picture to enlarge:
For now, though, this is where the JumboTron is: stacked up in the concourse, waiting to go to the big football stadium in the sky.
Tags: fedexfield, hd, jumbotron, video screens
Posted in General | 2 Comments »
By John on Oct 20, 2012 | Reply
Good old JumboTron, would give it a new home if I could.
By Andy on Dec 18, 2012 | Reply
Just an observation – Jumbotrons of that age did not use LED technology – instead each stacking module was made up of 12 8×8 pixel specialised cathode ray tubes.
If you take the back off you will find a high voltage flyback transformer that looks almost identical to those in regular CRT TV’s, plus all the high voltage cabling.
Advances in efficient and more reliable LED technology have made this type of display obsolete in the same way that few people still use CRT monitors or TVs at home.