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Edge vs Back Illuminated Displays

Edge vs back illuminated displays are two of the main forms of lighting posters for the advertising industry. Both have undergone many revisions in design and composition to improve the lighting quality of light boxes.

As the pressure increases on manufacturers to produce higher quality products, emphasis on the light quality has come to the forefront of advertisers minds.

Historically, illumination of a light box consisted of inserting a number of fluorescent tubes behind the poster, but gave little consideration to power consumption, light distribution or light quality. This resulted in the traditional 'striping' boxes.

Striping is the market terminology for the condition of lighting 'hot spots' produced from the fluorescent tubes observed through the poster face.

Edge illuminated displays attempt to combat this by moving the light source to the sides of the unit, outside the view area and allowing the light to go through a solid clear acrylic panel. This panel can either be printed with a graduated matrix on its surface or formulated with compounds which allow the light to exit the acrylic at specific angles to the panel surface.

It is difficult to produce even light distribution with back lit fluorescent tubes. Development driven by Tharsus Vision over many years has produced a patented diffuser panel. Named 'REFLEX' this panel has a differential mask printed to the surface of the panel and has specifically formulated diffuser film added to remove the 'striping' effect by compensating for the high spots.

Advantages of backlit illuminated displays are:

• Adds very little weight to the box
• Very high efficiency levels - over twice as bright as Edge Lit units
• Low power consumption
• Good colour rendition
• Can be applied over the main advertising formats

Advantages of edge lit illuminated displays are:

• Can form the majority of the structure of a light box
• Higher efficiency in smaller format units
• Good colour rendition
• Can be used with a variety of light sources (LED, fluorescent, fiber optics)
• Slim design