The following is written for organisations in Kranj considering a programmable scrolling text display. We deal first with who will run it and what it will say, then with the honest question of whether a printed sign would serve you better, and only then with pitch, colour, brightness and scheduling. The technical figures are the same ones we build to everywhere; the reason for reading them last is that they matter less than the content plan.
LED scrolling sign in Kranj — manufacturing, installation, quote
Slovenia · 423 km from our plant in Győr
Of everything we make, the scrolling text board is the product most often bought for the wrong reason. In Kranj we see it ordered by pharmacies and clinics in the residential districts such as Planina and Zlato polje, by driving schools, by sports clubs and by municipal offices, and the hardware side of that decision is trivial; the part that decides whether it was worth the money is editorial. A scrolling board is a small publishing operation. Somebody has to write the messages, somebody has to approve them, and somebody has to notice when the text is out of date. A board on Slovenski trg still advertising last winter's opening hours does more damage to a business than no board at all, because it tells every passer-by exactly how much attention the organisation pays to its own front door. So this page starts with the message and gets to the electronics late.
Who in your organisation is going to write the messages?
Name the person before you order
Every successful scrolling board we have installed has a named owner and a rhythm. A pharmacy updates the duty roster weekly on a fixed day. A sports club posts the weekend fixtures every Thursday. A clinic changes consulting hours when the rota changes and not otherwise. Every failed one had the message list written enthusiastically during the first fortnight by whoever happened to be free, and then never again. Before we quote, we ask you to answer three questions on paper: who writes, who approves, and on which day of the week. If those answers do not exist, the honest recommendation is to spend the money elsewhere, and we will say so.
What does an out-of-date board actually cost you?
The message nobody removed
Consider what a stale display communicates. A board outside a Kranj surgery announcing a holiday closure that ended in August is read by every patient in September as evidence that nobody checks anything. A club board still promoting a fixture that was played two months ago suggests the club is dormant. The scrolling display is unusual among signs in that its credibility depends on maintenance: a painted sign that has not changed in five years is simply a sign, but a changeable board that has not changed in five weeks is a broken one. This is the argument for a short message list that is genuinely maintained over a long one that is not.
How long can a single message be before people stop reading it?
Count the characters, including the diacritics
A passer-by on a pavement gives a scrolling line about four to six seconds of attention before moving on, which in practice means one idea and roughly forty to sixty characters. Slovenian adds a specific constraint that clients often overlook: the characters č, š and ž need the full glyph height to remain distinct, so a board built for cramped capitals will render them poorly. Write your five longest real messages out before choosing a board, count the characters in each, and design the line length around the longest one. That single exercise prevents the most common regret, which is a board too short for the sentences the organisation actually needs to say.
When is a printed sign the better purchase?
An answer we give more often than you would expect
If your content changes once a season, a well-made printed or illuminated sign is cheaper, needs no controller and cannot display last year's information. If your content changes weekly and carries a real consequence for the reader, being wrong is worse than being absent, and the scrolling board earns its place. Between those two cases sits a third that we see frequently in Kranj: an organisation whose content changes often but whose audience is not standing outside the building. A club whose members meet at the Kranj sports hall and a service whose users arrive by appointment both fall into it. There, a board on the street is the wrong channel and the same budget put into the website and a screen inside the waiting area does far more work.
What technical specification does your content plan then imply?
Pitch, colour, brightness and the way text arrives
Once the message list exists, the hardware follows quickly. Text strips are built from the same modules as our large walls, 32 centimetres wide and 16 tall, so the line length is a multiple of 32. A board read from three to six metres on a pavement suits P2.5 to P4; one read from across a road at twenty-five metres or more sits comfortably at P4 to P8. Single colour is legible, cheap and entirely adequate for information; full colour is only worth the difference if the content is genuinely visual. Outdoors the board is IP65 and runs at 4500 to 5500 nits with automatic dimming; indoors, behind glass in a foyer, 700 to 800 nits is right. Messages are loaded over the network, from a USB stick, or over Wi-Fi so that no data cable has to be pulled to the display position.
How do we hand the board over so that it stays yours?
Access, training and spares
Commissioning includes a working session with the person named as the owner, not with whoever is on the desk that afternoon. We set up the message list together, schedule at least one real message with a start and end date, and write the access credentials into a handover sheet that stays with the organisation rather than with an individual. Kranj is 423 kilometres from our Győr workshop, so travel and the daily allowance appear as separate lines on the quotation and reserve modules travel with the board. The warranty runs for one or two years depending on the configuration. What it cannot cover is the only failure that really matters, which is a board that nobody updates.
