BE PATIENT, IT WILL HAPPEN! 4TS - all 4 Signs will be the...

BE PATIENT, IT WILL HAPPEN!

4TS - all 4 Signs will be the largest full motion video signage in the World! ***NO ARRANT FLASHES*** But at this moment, NASDAQ sign is still the largest video screen ever activated 4 years ago.
The NASDAQ sign at 4 Times Square (the Condé Nast Building) was unveiled in 2000. NASDAQ's MarketSite Tower features an eight story (120’ x 90’) cylindrical sign. It is the largest sign in Times Square, as well as the most technologically advanced and the most expensive. It has a palette of over 16 million colors and over 8,000 panels which display ads and stock info. The 30 cutout windows allow light to enter the building. Plans are also in the works to add huge, new LumaSigns to the top of 4 Times Square. For more, see these websites:

Turning Pixels Into Panache
Nasdaq's Sign on Times Square Fulfills a High-Tech Dream
By JAYSON BLAIR Relying on a maze of minicircuitry, Nasdaq’s new sign on Times Square has turned heads with a procession of colorful images on a 90- by 120-foot screen.

Four years ago, Frank G. Zarb, chief executive of the Nasdaq stock market's parent company, decided to take the role of visionary leader to a new level: he would commission a Times Square sign so big and bright that it would make all the others blur into the background.

The result is the eight-story cylindrical sign that wraps around the recently completed Condé Nast Building, at Broadway and 43rd Street. And while Douglas Leigh's Camel cigarette billboard from the 1940's, with its wafting smoke rings, may be the neighborhood's most legendary advertising property, few if any new signs in Times Square - and there are plenty of them - have elicited such wonder and amazement, from tourists and denizens alike.

"Times Square has become a corporate theme park," said George Stonebly, whose office on the fourth floor of the Paramount Building is across the Street from the Nasdaq sign.

Mr. Stonebly, the president of Spectracolor Communications, is one of Times Square's most prominent sign designers. He said the Nasdaq screen fulfilled Mr. Zarb's dream: it is now acknowledged as the largest, most colorful, most technologically advanced and most expensive display in Times Square.

The 120-foot-tall screen displays more than 16.7 million distinct colors. It cost - along with the Nasdaq marketing center beneath it - more than $37 million, a little bit less than what Gov. George W. Bush of Texas had spent on his presidential campaign through the beginning of January.

A quick tour: The screen wraps 90 feet around the Condé Nast Building and takes up about the same space as three basketball courts. It is 18 inches thick and its surface is more than 10,000 square feet. It is made up of more than 8,200 panels, or modules, which can be divided into eight simultaneously operated screens.

From a control room in the Condé Nast Building, operators and mangers run the screen, which displays advertisements and stock information from companies listed on the Nasdaq market — anything from simple text to full-motion movies.

The screen is set five feet off the building facade. That provides enough space for a three-foot-wide catwalk for maintenance workers. There are 30 cutouts in the screen that allow natural light to enter the building through windows. The cutouts were not part of the original design, company officials say, but their positioning allows the mind to fill in the spaces unconsciously.

The display is powered by more than 800 shoebox-size power units attached to the back of the screen, officials said. Unlike a television or a laptop computer screen, the display can be viewed clearly in true color from a 170-degree angle.

Beneath the sign’s skin are 18 million light-emitting diodes, or L.E.D.’s, attached to minicircuits called pixels. Within each pixel are eight small light-emitting diodes. L.E.D.’s are commonly used as the red volume indicators on stereos and other electronic devices, as well as the screen power indicators on some cellular telephones.

But on the Times Square screen, the L.E.D.’s are lined up — two blue in the middle with two green and a red on one side and two red and a green on the other — so that the flickering lights are translated by the brain as true colors and images. This prevents the image from breaking up as a viewer walks around the screen, the designers say.

The quality of the color is a benefit of the technology, as well. The density of the pixels allows for bright and vivid colors that can be viewed easily in direct sunlight, said Paul Amenta, the executive vice president of SACO SMARTVISION, the Montreal-based company that designed the sign. The density, he said, also makes the image clear, even from blocks away. In some spaces, the pixels are only 20 millimeters, or three-quarters of an inch, apart.

Signals sent from more traditional sources — videocassettes or animated computer drawings, for example — flow through computers in the control room to distributors that translate the video signals into sequence codes for the pixels, which produce the colors that make up the images.

Officials added that the L.E.D.’s were also less prone to damage from temperature change or blowouts than light bulbs, and were supposed to last 100 times longer — a total of 100,000 hours. Some companies are working on white L.E.D. prototypes that could eventually be used to re place light bulbs, said Gary Nalven, SMARTVISION’s managing director.

Nasdaq and its parent the National Association of Securities Dealers, is paying the Condé Nast building's landlord, Douglas Durst, $2 million a year to lease the space for its sign - the largest L.E.D. display in the world and the largest single sign of any kind in Times Square.

SMARTVISION created the giant screens used on stage by the Irish rock band U2 and at Ravens Stadium in Baltimore. Making the screen seem real on such a curved surface is the most complicated and costly feature, Mr. Nalven said.

The company envisions similar signs replacing billboards, allowing several advertisers to use the space at different times, tailoring their messages depending on the time of day. “Given the size, resolution and versatility, the screen has the potential of revolutionizing outdoor advertising,” Mr. Nalven said.

In fact, the company is planning similar display for the side of a Covenant House building at 10th Avenue and 43rd Street. That sign will carry advertisements from several companies.

Despite the technology in the Times Square sign, there have been problems, officials acknowledge. The front of the screen is sealed in translucent coating to prevent damage, but water has seeped in from the windows in the screen, causing some damage and technical problems, including ***arrant flashes***.

Nasdaq had the windows installed by a separate company and is looking at ways to correct the problems, SMARTVISION officials said. “On a project of this scope, you expect some problems,” Mr. Amenta said, “There is always going to be something.”



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For more information, e-mail Fred Jalbout or telephone (514) 745-0310.



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SACO Technologies, Inc., 7809 Trans Canada, Montreal, Quebec, H4S 1L3, Tel: 514-745-0310, Fax: 514-745-0315