Toshiba launches giant high-def billboard in Times Square

In a picture window ceremony at the heart of New York City, Toshiba yesterday unveiled its biggest and most resplendent HD display upgrade to date: How about a 73-foot-diagonal, LED-based display hanging over Times Square?

NEW YORK (BetaNews) -- Behind picture windows in Manhattan's Times Square last night, Toshiba launched a roughly 2,700-square-foot, 1.6 million pixel high definition billboard -- about twice as big as the Toshiba light emitting diode (LED) signage which wowed CES crowds this year -- while also kicking off sales of its massive LEDs in the US market.

Following a "lighting of the sign" ceremony, held in a large function room of a Manhattan hotel, Toshiba brass from the US and Japan chatted with customers and journalists, who meanwhile were peering at the super-bright Toshiba sign a block down the street at One Times Square -- a location made internationally famous by the annual "dropping of the crystal ball" on New Years Eve.

"The difference between our sign and the other signs at One Times Square is like night and day," contended Charley Bocklet, Toshiba's national sales manager for LED display systems, drawing comparisons between Toshiba's blinking, animated sign and adjacent electronic billboards for Panasonic and Chevrolet.

"Look at the amount of detail [in the animations on the Toshiba sign]. That's going to be great for showing products! And we'll be able to use small lettering that can still be read from far away," Bocklet said, in an interview with BetaNews at the event.

Toshiba plans to use the luminescent billboard to advertise products such as its Ragza HDTVs and Satellite notebooks. The billboard will also appear in next year's globally televised Times Square New Year's festivities.

"The goal of this sign is to send Toshiba product information and company activity information to the world. The sign's LED technology has been engineered and manufactured by Toshiba, and it demonstrates our leadership in LED and our 130 years of leading technological innovation," maintained Toshiba America Inc. CEO Masa Fukakushi, in remarks at the billboard ceremony.

Although Toshiba claims its new sign is the "highest def" billboard in Times Square, officials acknowledged that its resolution isn't as high as that of the signage Toshiba put up in January at CES.

But then again, the Times Square sign is about twice as large -- measuring 51.2 feet by 52.5 feet without the frame -- and it is an outdoor display, a different class of LED product from the interior display shown at CES.

As the acronym suggests, LED technology uses rows of adjacent electronic diodes to beam out brightness. Eddie Temistokle, Toshiba America's manager of corporate communications and Webmaster, told BetaNews that resolution is determined not by the number of hardware diodes per panel, but by special software which interpolates content from its original source into the HD format used by the LED display and also establishes pixel ratio.

"This is the first sign we've had in Times Square in at least ten years," according to Temistokle. A poster in the room showed an earlier Toshiba sign in the Manhattan neighborhood, photographed in 1984.

In December of last year, Toshiba started the process of establishing the permanent LED display in Manhattan, nailing down a long-term lease on an exterior wall space at One Times Square previously occupied by Discovery.

Toshiba assembled its new Times Square billboard from 140 LED panels, shipped from Japan and then lifted by elevator to the upper reaches of the building at One Times Square.

Toshiba's factories in Japan have long turned out electronic signage for sale to other companies in that country. In the US, Toshiba is one of the top three players in the electronic sign rental market, producing signs used to advertise concerts, for instance, he said.

Now the vendor will start selling its gigantic LED displays to other companies in North America, BetaNews was told.

Toshiba also plans to build a permanent LED display for use at the Foxwood/MGM Casino in Connecticut, according to Fukakushi.