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In a project of 700 square meters(7 displays 100 square meters each) of 6mm that the airport of one of the world’s largest and most advanced cities buys, they want to have redundancy of power and signal, fault detection by pixel, detection on led modules for operation status, EMC compliance, etc. Now would your control system supplier be able to help you fulfill this job?
Maybe, and maybe not? Then you may have lost a job of more than 3 million US dollars. Or worse than that, you might have taken the job, but were not able to get it done as required, and were faced with a huge penalty and a big damage of your reputation. Sad, isn’t it?

Which one is better? Linsn, Nova, or Colour Light? What about Z-dec, and DB-Star? And a lot of other smaller control systems?
What are the advantages of each controller?
Being a professional who has been in the sales and marketing for the global market, especially for the EU market, Jimmy Feng, one of the partners in Darklight Technology, is providing you with some viewpoints from his perspective now.

Basically the majority of the led display companies through out the world, who take about 80% of the displays sold by numbers (not by amount) in the world-wide market place, select one control system from the “Big Three”, Nova, Linsn, and Colorlight. Therefore, by knowing more about the strength and weakness of these “big three”, you can decide whom to work with in the long run, and whom to speak to for a particular project, and who you should keep a distance with to avoid getting hurt.


Services


When you are small, you can’t expect good services from any of these three providers of control systems, withLinsn being slightly better than the rest, at least they answer your phones with patience and now they are in a struggle to re-capture their first place by improving their response to customer’s request.






Nova does have a good business strategy. They participate in big shows in the overseas market with a big team who speak fairly good English, speaking to the local display companies, providing them with information and knowledge of their products (control system and the related components).







Colorlight has the poorest disciplines of services. “I had a bad experience with Colorlight not long ago,” said Jimmy, “We delivered a big project of about 700 square meters of 6mm to one of the most prestigious and advanced and busy airports in the world, with the control system customized from Colorlight. But they failed to realize one of the most important features the client requested: fault detection with pixel, working with PWM driver. And when we chased them for help, the sales director, who was solely responsible for the whole project, did not pick up the phone.”




Technologies & Applications

Nova, without doubt. Despite the many problems Nova may have, such as their order-oriented (volume oriented policy, i.e. whoever buys more from them enjoy more favorable pricing and services from them, etc.) policy, they are closer to the world-wide market than the rest two. Overseas market is their focus strategically.

For examples:
1. They are much stronger in pixel calibration. They have their own powerful calibration tools and software;
2. They have far more experiences working with Macro Block’s drivers, especially PWM drivers. MBI is believed to have 60% of the market share of driver ICs;
3. They have better fault detection compatibility with the relative drivers and therefore more stable in this field;
4. They are by far better than the rest in controlling irregular displays, such as other than rectangular shapes.;
5. They have a lot more direct contacts with the local display companies throughout the world, and therefore they have better knowledge of the local market places throughout the world;
They have much better product literature in English, etc.





Linsn
used to be by far the number 1 in market share throughout the world. From 2008-2011, they had about 60% of the world’s market share in control system, enjoying superb high profit margin. Since then, they got lost in their mind, believing they are invincible. They became lazy and reluctant in reacting to customers’ requests, until they had lost their first place to Nova in about 2012-2013. Now they tried, very hard, to catch up and gain back their first place, but the team seem not to be disciplined enough to compete in the overseas market. They lost more or less the whole Europe and a big part of the US market.





Colorlight
is the youngest among the “big three”. They are strong in development and offer a lot of customized projects. But the standardization and discipline levels are low in this company. Overseas business is far beyond their access and therefore they don’t even have a good brochure in English.




DB Star & Z-dec

These are dramatically shrinking companies and it is believed that they will either leave this industry, or…


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