440m2 screen has fewer pixels than iPad
Sydney horse racing track gets slightly grainy mega-ultra-jumbo-tron
Punters who trot off to Sydney’s Rosehill Gardens will soon be able to watch horse racing on a 40 by 11 meter screen.
Construction on the new screen started in January and is scheduled to conclude in time for a race meeting on March 31st. The screen rests on a four-tier steel frame and is so heavy that piles have been sunk eight metres below the turf. A project manager working on the display said it has also been the subject of “wind engineering”.
A 185-metre tunnel was bored beneath the track to wire the massive display to its control room, where an all-fibre network shuttles video around at impressive speed.
US company Daktronics, which has built all sorts of stadium screens all over the world, supplied the kit for the new display. Rosehill tells us that Daktronics' DVX-500-15HD display modules got the gig.
We've been waiting for a couple of days for Daktronics and the Australian Turf Club (ATC), owner of Rosehill, to tell us the resolution of the screen.
But we're tired of waiting because it seems possible – thanks to miracle of division - to make a decent guess because the spec sheet for the DVX-1500_HD module says each packs 24 lines of 24 pixels into a 365.76mm by 365.76mm frame.
So let's do the maths. A metre is 1000 millimetres, so the screen is 40,000mm wide. That means it is 109.36 DVX-1500_HD modules wide. Let's call it 109.
We also know the screen is 11,000mm deep, or 30.06 modules. Let's call that 30.
Another bash of the calculator later and we get 2616 pixels wide and 720 pixels deep, for a grand total of 1,883,520 pixels, rather less than the 3,145,728 pixels on the new iPad's 2,048 by 1,536 screen. But then we suppose it's rather hard to play Angry Birds on Rosehill's monster, pictured below.
That's not in the ATC's plans, anyway. Instead the club expects to show horse races from multiple angles as they are run. As the screen rather conveniently faces a grandstand (and has been wired into it's sound system) the club is also dreaming up other events it might stage. Rock concerts apparently aren't on that list as promoters like the screen, but touring bands generally bring their own. ®
COMMENTS
big screen and horses.
So as they come around the final curve and into the finishing straight, the horses will catch a glimpse of truly MASSIVE racehorses thundering towards them out of the sky.
Can anyone see the chance of a problem with this?
Daktronics
I keep misreading "Daktronics" as "Dk'tronics", the company who used to make a whole host of peripherals for 8 bit computers in the 80''s. Thereby evoking the image of an Amstrad CPC hooked up to an 11 metre screen.
It's/its
'it is sound system' was all I heard. Call me anal.
Re: It's/its
El Reg went to the trouble of providing an icon specifically for grammar Nazis. It seems only polite to use it when goose-stepping to the beat of the grammar-phone.
Retina Display?
So each pixel is ~15mm square (or round as the case may be).
Apple's Retina Display claim for the iphone was based on the pixels being less than 57arcseconds in size at 12 inches away (in the case of the iPhone, the pixels are approximately 53as at 12 inches.)
If my math is correct, for the pixels of this display to be less than 57as in size, the viewer should be about 59 meters away or more. That's your sweet spot.
