Stern breaking ground with a new color display? UPDATE - Not yet

By Kevin L'Heureux

If you'd have looked at the teaser video for the upcoming Metallica pinball machine by Stern Pinball you might have noticed something different than you are used to seeing on a Stern game. 

We have been hearing rumblings of a new / revised board set coming from Stern with expanded capabilities and it appears as though Metallica pinball may be the first to use this new board set. If you look closely, you will see that the display frames shown in the video appear to be a multitude of color instead the typical orange display of the past games. Now this could just be a part of the programming process on the deveoplment platform they are using but time will tell. Another frame from the teaser video shows what appears to be a frame consisting of the Metallica font in white art exclusively. Also note that the art shows up as "clean" images which may conclude the use of an LCD panel instead of a DMD display.

Recent use of the LED dot matrix technology appears to have been the gateway to the new and improved color system that Stern will be implementing. Operators, players and collectors are sure to be greatly appreciative of the transition from orange displays to the 21st century with these color displays.

What do you think?  Leave a reply below in the comments section. 

UPDATE - As pointed out by readers here and elsewhere, the color animations that you see are native to the programing platform used by Stern and NOT and actual representation of what will appear in the game. There have been solid rumors of Stern moving to a Color LCD panel in an upcoming games so hopefully we will see that soon.

KL