If you’re thinking about buying a new scoreboard for your stadium, school, or sports field, it can be a truly intimidating prospect. How do you take the experience of a hype match and keep up with it in the form of numbers following the action? A lot of the time, sadly, people end up going cheap with this kind of purchase and it can show. Not immediately, of course, since good talkers can often end up selling something that at the start works just fine.
But, if you’re well-acquainted with large tech-based specialty services, you know very well that over time the weaknesses of a hastily-assembled solution will begin to show its problems. So, how do you spot the best scoreboards, and how big should your board end up being?
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In the Footsteps of Giants
If you’re renovating a previously-used stadium or event center the answer may be simply based on the answer to a simple question: how big was the previous scoreboard? These types of displays can come in a huge variety of different sizes, shapes, and types, based on the type of sport played. In general, you can click here for the Wikipedia article explaining some of the differences. Though generally not the best for specifics, broad-strokes over many sports are necessary to find out which type and size are best.
Some scoreboards aren’t necessarily just a board that displays the point total in a direction. For baseball specifically, a lot of stuff goes into a proper board, and for indoor stadiums sometimes even 1 board isn’t enough. An omnidirectional display in four directions at the center of a stadium is flashy, but generally super expensive and requires upkeep, as well as stability not needed by simpler options.
A Classic Feel
For many people, scoreboards fit a very specific form factor. You have those classic pixelated numbers that change in digital sports scoreboards based on the tallies of a neutral official. Think of an old digital clock, turning off specific sections of the screen to create numbers from simple lights. These are preferable as a very simple solution to a lot of problems.
Are you having trouble keeping track of all the fanciness brought with a full LED screen? It can be super cool to see these in action, but for the most part, they are a pain to upkeep, a pain to clean, and if something goes wrong on the software end it can be a difficult fix, to say the least. And, just like a computer, these types of screens do suffer from software problems that you might get in a monitor 100 times the size of a normal flatscreen monitor. You don’t get the perspective from the stands, but the central LED displays are enormous.
Though the young may find some solace in the technological nature of projecting something on a computer to the screen, more mechanical options preserve some of that old magic and have a lot fewer points of failure should something go wrong.
Retro Nature
Digital scoreboards of all types and sizes have the retro feeling of a 90’s sports stadium. A lot of old sports movies use these types of scoreboards, and there’s a reason they’ve persisted for so long. They are super easy to upkeep and use in equal measure. In order to clean one of these classics, it just requires a few simple procedures which you can find here: https://hminewzealand.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/recommended-procedures-for-electronic-scoreboard-maintenance-during-off-season/ to keep it ready for the next big game.
That is another special advantage of this type of display: ease of use. Many LED alternatives require serious attention to drivers, software, and maintenance to keep them up-to-date. If you don’t have someone whose dedicated job it is to keep the hulking screen from breaking, a lot of the time it will before long. This isn’t to say digital boards are like riding a bike, but for many people who have been in the game a while a digital scorekeeper is a familiar sight that can easily and quickly transfer what you know to be true onto a visible display.
That is the big takeaway with this type of large monitor: if you want to keep things quick and easy and familiar, a lot of the time installing a digital scoreboard is the preferred method. Don’t let yourself get excitedly caught up in the sales pitches of a thousand people who have never operated a scoreboard. If you want to keep your stadium matches hype, the best way to do it is a callback to decades of sports history, dramatic wins, and championships brought home from the brink of disaster. An easy way to keep your history alive is to link the two using the display of the game.