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Colour DMDs

huggers

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Joined
Sep 22, 2016
Messages
3,238
Location
West Dorset
Alias
Andy Hug
Going to buy a colour DMD. Best place to get one? LED or LCD? Is it game dependent what suits? Anything else I should know? It'll be going in a Spidey that has stock incandescents (for now), cheers guys
 

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Cheers dude. Looks like 310 quid from pinball palace is the way to go. Any thoughts on LED vs LCD?
 
From the maker:
LED: 128x32 discrete RGB LEDs. Small form factor. Brighter and more vivid colors. Fixed smaller size dots - can't take advantage of smoothing or other rendering modes. Susceptible to ghosting artifacts due to undesirable capacitive effects.

LCD: 1920x1080 backlit LCD screen (only a portion of the screen is used). Original proven design sold since early 2012. Pixels are used to draw dots. Six rendering modes (DOTS, DOTXL, TILE, 8BIT, SCAN, and HIRES). Large dots and smoothing modes minimize black space making text easier to read. Smoothing modes are popular for cartoon-like animation.
LED is (I think?) a smaller panel so if you have clearance issues then it might be the only option. Depends on the game.

All things being equal LCD gives you more flexibility. All 3 of my pins have the LCD version.
 
Cheers guys that's great. Looks like I'll grab an LCD then. Will have to wait until the end of the month though, 400 quid, ouch!
 
I'm happy enough with LCD. Bought mine when they were still just below 300 ...and that took me months to to psych myself up for :rofl:

Some titles better than others - depends on the colouring, and original dots to some extent. My only slight gripes are that the black isn't quite black enough and the colours can be a little muted. I usually run it in Dots XL mode as default ...sometimes I'll put it in another mode just for sh*ts and giggles. It's nice to have some choices.
 
Some have said the crude video on SM looks better with an LED display. They might be right.

Personally I always use LCD’s.
 
Not every machine is compatible with LCD, such as JP, but thankfully the LED ones are still pretty awesome looking. I prefer LED because I don't like that the blacks aren't super black on an LCD screen and sometimes you can get that milkiness from sunlight glare that you often see on LCD screens in general. But it's a preference thing really. The different display modes on LCD is a really cool feature that isn't replicated in LED.
 
Have lcd in quite a few of mine except Cirqus Voltaire where only the led version will fit, still very nice though.
I would go lcd due to the options you have with the look.
 
Colour DMDs very expensive so my view is that it needs to be a "top end" machine to justify the investment. I have one on my TAF and it does look awesome - and should I ever sell it I'm sure the spend will come back in the sale price!
 
Spiderman is one of my machines that ive held off with a colour DMD as the ones ive seen i havent been overly impressed with the movie clips, so i just fitted a stern red DMD instead as i had one spare
 
The LED is very bright. I far prefer the LCD version but it didn’t fit in JP

The VAT is a killer on it. I struggle to justify £400+ for one

Originally thought I’d just swap them between games but that never really happened. Easy enough to do but I still can’t be ****d

Need to get around to buying yet another one with the right mounting bracket for GOT
 
I’ve had both and far prefer the LED one over LCD. To me LCD looks washed out but more importantly the LED looks more in keeping with the classic DMD games.
I was also not a fan of the modes on the LCD and preferred it in Big Dot XL as opposed to any other effect. As for the hires effect it looks ridiculous IMO and more like some sort of daubed paint effect.
I recently moved my LCD on with the last pin I sold nd it will be replaced by LED
 
For Spider-Man and GoT and any game that uses scanned footage LCD works better. Only exception to this is GB.


Neil


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The general consensus seems to be LCD. I'll likely go with that. The thing that really surprised me is how awesome the incandescent lighting is on Spidey, the effects are superb. Not sure I'm going to rush to OCD/LED it, it's already stunning!
 
The general consensus seems to be LCD. I'll likely go with that. The thing that really surprised me is how awesome the incandescent lighting is on Spidey, the effects are superb. Not sure I'm going to rush to OCD/LED it, it's already stunning!
I love the ball lock thunder effect.
 
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