What is brightness adjustment, and how can you use it to optimize your LED screen displays?
If you’ve ever struggled with LED screens being too bright or too dim, you may feel that achieving the perfect visual balance is challenging.
However, with the right brightness adjustment techniques, you can enhance screen visibility and performance across various environments. One of the effective tools for this task is NovaLCT.
In This Article
What is Brightness Adjustment?
Brightness adjustment refers to modifying an LED screen’s luminance output. It involves adjusting the screen’s brightness value to match the ambient light conditions, ensuring the display remains clear and visible to the audience.
Why Do You Need to Adjust Brightness of LED Screen?
LED screens can be subject to various environments where their brightness might need adjustment for several reasons:
- Visibility: To ensure that the content displayed is clearly visible under different lighting conditions.
- Energy Efficiency: To reduce power consumption by lowering brightness when it’s unnecessarily high.
- Longevity: To prevent overheating and extend the lifespan of the LED components.
- Audience Comfort: To avoid glare for viewers, particularly in darker environments.
After understanding the importance, it’s time to proceed to adjust the LED screen’s brightness settings. In this guide, we will use NovaLCT as our example. However, other brands of controllers may have similar procedures to help you achieve the same results.
Running NovaLCT and Logging In
To adjust your LED screen brightness, first, you need to log in to the Novastar NovaLCT software.
Open the NovaLCT and click on the “User” menu on the main interface. From the dropdown list, choose “Advanced Synchronous System User“.
After that, a prompt interface will appear, requiring the password. Enter the default password ‘admin‘ if not been changed before. Once entered, click “Login” and you’ll gain access to the software.
How to Adjust Brightness Manually
Upon logging in, click on button “Brightness” to enter the “Brightness Adjustment” interface. NovaLCT provides two primary modes of adjustment: Manual Adjustment and Auto Adjustment.
Here we introduce the manual adjustment first.
This manual mode is typically used in rental led screens. You can manually adjust the brightness by dragging the slider bar, which changes the screen’s brightness instantly. There are two modes within manual adjustment:
- Grayscale Mode: Enhances grayscale performance during brightness changes, ideal for indoor screens with low brightness requirements.
- Contrast Mode: Maintains better contrast during brightness changes, recommended for outdoor screens in high-light conditions.
After making the adjustments, click “Save to HW” (Save to Hardware) to store the settings in the receiving cards.
How to Adjust Brightness Automatically
For fixed installations LED screens, automatic adjustments are often preferred. First, check the Radio button “Auto Adjustment”,
Then click the button “Wizard Setting” at the bottom of the interface, and you will be guided to a new interface where you will see two modes to select: Advanced Adjustment mode and Adjustment By Light Sensor mode.
Adjusting by Light Sensor
In this mode, brightness is controlled by a light sensor setup, which requires a physical connection to the controller. For controllers like Novastar MCTRL300 and MCTRL600, you can connect it to the light sensor directly. However, an Novastar MFN300 multifunction card is required for Other controllers such as MCTRL1600, and MCTRL 4K, etc.
Here is an example for Novastar MCTRL600 connecting light sensor:
Here is an example for light sensor connecting Novastar MFN300 card:
Ensure the connections are complete, then select “Adjust by Light Sensor“.
Then click “Next” to the interface of Light Sensor Setting.
Activate the test mode by clicking the “Light Sensor Test” button, which will then change to “Stop Test“. Next, click “Refresh” Once this is complete, ensure that the environment brightness value has been set to zero.
Afterward, click the “Stop Test” button, which will revert to “Light Sensor Test“. Click “Refresh” again to verify that the environment brightness value detected by the light sensor has changed successfully.
Don’t forget to enable the light sensor by checking the radio “Whether to enable” after successful tests .
Please note, in test mode, the screen brightness is changed instantly, but in wokring mode, the light sensor detects 5 times in 5 minutes before it change the brightness for saftey concerns.
Note that in test mode the screen brightness is changed instantly, but in working mode, the sensor takes multiple readings over five minutes for safety. You can change the setting according to the following steps.
First, right click the monitor site, enter “Brightness advanced setting” and change the detecting cycle and reading time
Next, adjust the detecting cycle and reading time. Click “Save” to keep the setting.
However, it is generally advisable to retain these settings and enable the “Enable the Brightness Gradient” option.
Next, to avoid losing brightness control if the light sensor fails, you can enable the option “When the light sensor fails, the brightness should be adjusted to” and then enter a specific value.
Next, in the brightness mapping table, click “Fast Section Division” to correlate screen brightness values with different ambient brightness levels.
You need to define both the maximum and minimum values, as well as the number of sections in between. The more sections you create, the finer the brightness control you achieve.
For instance, as shown in the above image, we set the upper limit for ambient brightness at 12,000 lux and the lower limit at 20 Lux, and set the screen brightness upper limit of 80% and lower limit of 20%, with 20 sections between them, and then click “OK”.
After that, as you can see from the following image, the min environmental brightness is 20 Lux, and max is 12000 LUX and the table has 20 rows with screen brightness rangs from 20% to 80%.
You can click the Green add icon and Red delete icon to add or delete the brightness mapping as you want.
Additionally, if you want to prevent your screen from becoming too bright at night, you can enable a night mode. This will ensure that the screen does not exceed a specific brightness level during nighttime hours. To activate night mode, simply check the Checkbox “Opening” at the section of Night Mode.
In the meantime, you can then use the green cross icon to set the start and end times for the night period, along with the maximum screen brightness for that timeframe. For example, as shown in the following image, Night mode is set to start at 7:00 PM and end at 6:00 AM, and the screen brightness remains below 30%.
Please be aware that the light sensor can operate in an offline mode, meaning it doesn’t need to be connected to a PC for automatic adjustments. Here are a few points to keep in mind:
- When using multiple controllers in a cascaded setup, ensure the light sensor is connected to the first controller, or to the MFN300 that is connected to it.
- Night mode is not compatible with offline operation.
- Multiple screen configurations offline mode.
Adjusting using Advanced Adjustment Mode
Next, we talk about how to adjust using advanced adjustment mode.
First, select “Advanced Adjustment“, then click “Next” to trigger a new interface: Time Points Settings.
In that interface, you can see a table with fields: Start Adjusting Time, Adjustment Method, brightness (%), and the operation buttons Edit and Delete.
First, click the button “Add” to add several staring times and the specific brightness value starting from them. For instance, as follow image, set the screen brightness as the Environment Brightness at 0 AM, set it to 40% brightness starting at 8 AM, and increase it to 80% by 12 PM.
In addition, you can edit or delete for further management with the corresponding operation button.
After adding, click “Next” to proceed to the light sensor settings interface. The steps here are the same as those outlined earlier for adjusting brightness using the light sensor.
If everything is well configured, Click “Finish” and Click “Save to HW” to save the setting to the receiving card.
At this point, the brightness adjustment process is complete.
To Sum up
Adjusting the brightness of your LED screens is crucial for achieving optimal visibility and performance. This guide has outlined two effective methods using NovaLCT: manual adjustment and automatic adjustment. You can pick the method that aligns with your requirements. For more LED display tutorials, check here.