Projection Belongs in the Theater. Every Other Room Belongs to LED
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Author President - Vanguard LED Displays
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Published February 19
2026
I’ve got a bit of a history with projection, which will always be my first love for display technologies. Many years ago, I ran the 35mm projection booth of a 24-plex. I’ll never lose the muscle memory of threading and maintaining those projectors, or things like the Christie P35GPS trap and gate having two 3/16 bolts to remove. I’ve worked for Christie Digital and Barco during the digital cinema conversion, directly participating in the conversion of thousands of auditoriums from 35mm to digital. There was an intense satisfaction in pulling an old and poorly calibrated 35mm and replacing it with a sharp and vibrant image.
I share this because it helps to understand where I’m coming from when I say that I’m genuinely excited about direct-view LED technology. I’ll probably never stop loving projection, 35mm and digital, but projection only maximizes its value when the ambient conditions are as controlled as they are in movie theater auditoriums. Change the shape, size, and environment, and projection will always struggle. As projected light, it’s entirely vulnerable to any light being in the space.
Projection Has a Home. It’s the Theater.
I’ll defend projection in a movie theater until my last breath. The economics are undeniable — the cost per square foot of a projection-based auditorium is simply not something direct-view LED can compete with at scale. And in a properly designed theater, you’ve already solved the problems projection struggles with everywhere else: the room is dark, the ambient light is controlled; the seating geometry is engineered around a specific throw distance. Projection thrives there because the environment was literally built around it.
But take that same projector out of the theater and put it in a corporate boardroom, a house of worship, a government command center, a retail environment, a hotel lobby — and suddenly you’re fighting physics. Ambient light washes out the image. Speakers cast shadows. You need real estate for the throw, depth behind the screen for rear projection, and a technician on call for the bulb that’s inevitably going to die at the worst possible moment. None of these are design flaws. They’re just projection doing what projection does, in a room that wasn’t built for it.
Direct view LED doesn’t ask the room to change for it. It mounts flush to the wall, hangs from the ceiling, or maybe it is the floor under your feet. It performs in whatever light the space already has. No throw distance. No shadows. No fan noise humming under a quiet presentation. No constraints on size, shape, or environment. No bulb replacement schedules. It just works, and then keeps working in ways that start to feel almost unfair the more you understand the technology.
What Makes LED Feel Like the Future
Here’s what genuinely excites me about this technology, coming from someone who spent decades with projection:
- Knock on it. Go ahead. Make a fist and knock on a dvLED panel like you’re knocking on a door. Nothing happens. No damage, no disruption, no cracked element. The structural resilience of these displays is something you have to experience to believe.
- Pull a module while it’s powered. The modules run on low-voltage DC. You can physically remove a failing module from a live wall, swap in a spare, and the display keeps running around it. Onsite calibrated spare parts mean a single technician can resolve most issues without a service call, without downtime, without drama.
- Decentralized function. This one took me a while to fully appreciate. In a projection system, one lamp goes down and your image goes down. With dvLED, if a pixel fails, only that pixel goes dark. The display is a mosaic of thousands of independent elements. Failure at the micro level is almost imperceptible at the macro level. That’s not just redundancy; that’s a fundamentally different philosophy of reliability.
- Seamless at any scale. Want it bigger? Add panels. The image stays continuous. No edge blending, no calibration sessions between projectors drifting out of alignment at 2 a.m. before a board meeting. Just more screen.
- Matte finish. No hotspots, no reflections fighting you in a bright room. This alone eliminates one of the oldest arguments in AV integration.
- Contrast for days. The blacks are real blacks. Not “the room is dark enough that it looks black” — actual black, because the pixel is off. Combined with high peak brightness, the dynamic range is genuinely beautiful.
- And if you need it outside? Weather-sealed pixels and connectors enable placement directly in the rain. No special extra enclosure. It doesn’t care.
Every Other Room Belongs to LED
I’m not here to bury projection. I’m here to give it the respect of honesty: it belongs in the theater, and it’s magnificent there. But the boardroom, the lobby, the house of worship, the command center, the control room, the outdoor venue, the retail flagship, the simulation environment — those spaces deserve a display technology that was built for them rather than adapted to them. Direct view LED is that technology.
After thirty years and four display technologies, I’ve learned that loving what you know and embracing what’s better aren’t mutually exclusive. I’ve got an old 35mm projector sitting in my living room as a monument to an era I’m proud to have been part of. And then I go to work and spec LED walls, because that’s what the room deserves.
One screen changed my mind. The other still has my heart. Turns out there’s room for both.
A note on simulation environments: flexible LED tile configurations are opening genuinely new possibilities in dome and cylindrical simulation spaces — a topic that deserves its own conversation entirely.
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