Have you ever had a great idea...
...that turned out to be a tad bit impractical? Well I had one yesterday. I was thinking about getting a new TV again and my train of thought arrived at the "Why isn't there a REAL LED TV?" - you see, the LED TVs that are sold have a LED backlight but just are regular LCD TVs otherwise. Still much better image quality but it's not like the pixels are LEDs.
So I continued: What if I get myself some small LEDs and solder them together? Should be some work but doable, right? Right!
But then I did some computations... lets say I want full HD - that is 1920x1080 pixels... and at clusters of 4 LEDs each (one of the colors has to be double AFAIK it's G-R-B-G) a pixel would be a 6mm square (assuming the smaller 3mm LEDs and no space between them) that gives me... about 11500mm... or 11.5m... damn! that will NOT fit in my living room... :( also it would take 8294400 LEDs... even at the bargain bins, that would be waaaay to expensive... not to mention the 16588800 soldering points. Yikes. And then, just for fun, I calculated that it would take 165888A at 20mA each to make the entire panel light up at once. Of course it would be pulsed IRL but still... damn, there goes my home-made LED-TV. What a bummer. Well, back to the drawing board.
So I continued: What if I get myself some small LEDs and solder them together? Should be some work but doable, right? Right!
But then I did some computations... lets say I want full HD - that is 1920x1080 pixels... and at clusters of 4 LEDs each (one of the colors has to be double AFAIK it's G-R-B-G) a pixel would be a 6mm square (assuming the smaller 3mm LEDs and no space between them) that gives me... about 11500mm... or 11.5m... damn! that will NOT fit in my living room... :( also it would take 8294400 LEDs... even at the bargain bins, that would be waaaay to expensive... not to mention the 16588800 soldering points. Yikes. And then, just for fun, I calculated that it would take 165888A at 20mA each to make the entire panel light up at once. Of course it would be pulsed IRL but still... damn, there goes my home-made LED-TV. What a bummer. Well, back to the drawing board.