Construction begins on the Dallas Cowboys video scoreboard

Back in August we told you about the video scoreboard that the Dallas Cowboys were planning to install in their new stadium. It's HUGE, no doubt about it. Now, the massive task of building and hanging the scoreboard has begun. Here's part of an article from Star-Telegram.com:

"It cost $40 million to build Texas Stadium," the Cowboys’ 42-year-old former home in Irving, said Stephen Jones, Dallas Cowboys executive vice president.

At the new Arlington stadium, "the scoreboards alone cost more than $40 million," Jones told an audience at the University of Texas at Arlington’s Business Week dinner last month.

Crews finished assembling the two sideline scoreboards and two smaller scoreboards facing the end zones in March. Last week, they began "lighting" the boards, a process of calibrating the millions of LEDs so the pictures on the video screens appear seamless.

"In order to have that large of a display and not look like a checkerboard . . . we have to work very hard to match those LEDs across the board with the same color and properties," said Mark Foster, general manager of Mitsubishi Electric’s Diamond Vision Systems.

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Foster said that when installation is completed, Mitsubishi will apply to Guinness World Records to have the stadium scoreboard officially named the largest in the world. Mitsubishi already holds that title with its 218-foot-wide, 37-foot-tall (8,066 square feet) video screen at Tokyo Race Course in Japan.

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Mitsubishi made the LED panels in its factory in Nagasaki, Japan, and the electronic ribbon boards that encircle the stadium interior at its plant in Warrendale, Pa.

The panels, each 4-feet-by-5-feet, were shipped to the stadium and then hoisted up, one by one, onto a large metal frame that was built on the field and then lifted 90 feet into the air. Large orange sandbags were placed on the metal frame to mimic the weight of the screens, and as panels were installed, sandbags were removed from the frame.

Foster said that installing the panels while suspended in midair enabled technicians to keep seams from appearing in the large screen. Each panel is separated by only 10 millimeters.

Read the entire article...