“Mere certification and parameters won’t fix it’

The whole discussion on quality standards and testing of outdoor LED screens has many layers to it.  In this conversation, as part of the M4G series on ‘Lab Testing: The Way Ahead for LED Displays?’ Gangasagar Amula, Director at Absen India, shares his insights on why even where a quality standard exists and a certification is issued for LED screens, it may not tell buyers as much as they think it does. 

Gangasagar reiterates his point with one of the most commonly cited certifications on a DOOH spec sheet, IP rating, an internationally recognised scale that tells a buyer how well sealed a product is against dust and water. A screen rated IP65, for instance, is meant to withstand jets of water from any direction without letting moisture inside. On paper, it reads as a fixed, objective number, a screen either earns the rating or it doesn’t. Gangasagar’s point is that it isn’t quite that simple. 

“The common way to test it is to spray water at the product from one direction, then rotate it 360 degrees and repeat. Once you open it up and there’s no water inside, the lab certifies it as IP65.” That’s a legitimate, widely accepted method, and it’s enough to pass in most labs. 

Certification doesn’t convey the entire picture  

Gangasagar says his own team tests the same rating differently, spraying water from every angle, including underneath the unit, before certifying it. But he’s clear that the point isn’t to hold up one company’s method as the right one, it’s that both approaches produce the same “IP65” label, with no way for a buyer to tell which version of the test a given product actually went through. “People take that certificate and go to market with a specification,” he says. “But the certificate doesn’t tell you how the water was actually poured.” 

He points to brightness as a smaller-scale version of the same problem. A screen advertised at a given nit value can be tested to comfortably exceed that number, or tested just enough to scrape past it, and both approaches produce a spec sheet that reads the same way to a buyer. The figure on paper doesn’t say anything about how conservatively or how loosely it was arrived at. A buyer comparing two spec sheets showing an identical brightness figure has no way to know which manufacturer tested to a stricter bar and which didn’t. 

Standards alone won’t close the gap either 

Much of the current conversation around DOOH testing in India focuses on getting manufacturers to agree on a shared list of parameters, brightness, IP rating, thermal performance, that every screen should be tested against. Gangasagar doesn’t disagree with that goal, but he thinks it solves only part of the problem. 

“Standards exist across the globe,” he says. “In India, every state almost behaves like its own market, with its own rules. There should be a standard, the OEMs and the media owners need to come together and agree on what that standard should be.” But agreeing on which parameters to test, in his view, still leaves open the question of how strictly each one should be tested, and that’s a gap a parameter list alone doesn’t close. 

He’s blunt about what happens in that gap today. “Every OEM has the capability to build a good product,” he says. “It’s that some choose not to bring that product to market, they’d rather offer something cost-effective and substandard, because it helps them win the project on price. That devalues the entire system.”  

Neutral certification, compliance are key  

Gangasagar’s suggestion is that the industry needs an independent body, not any single manufacturer to define both the list of parameters and the method behind each one, so that a certification means the same thing regardless of who issued it. 

even then, he’s careful to separate certification from compliance, and thinks India’s gap sits more in the second than the first. “More than certification, it should be the mindset of the people,” he says. “If you’re doing this kind of certification, it should be from a third-party unbiased lab that can give you the trust that a particular product is going to withstand the needs of the market.” Certification, in his framing, is only useful if it comes from a lab with nothing to gain from the result, and if manufacturers treat it as an ongoing standard to maintain rather than a one-time box to tick. “People shouldn’t do certification for the sake of doing it,” he says. “They should comply, and make sure the same standards are maintained at the end.” He also sees a role for advertisers here, not just media owners: if brands started asking for certified products before booking media, that pressure would filter down and make compliance a practical requirement rather than a voluntary one.