We manufacture and install LED displays from a works in Győr, and Dubrovnik is 916 road kilometres away - the longest run on our Croatian list. This page sets out what that distance changes in practice: how a survey and an installation are combined into a single planned journey, why a rolling LED poster is often the faster and cheaper answer here than a mounted wall, how indoor and outdoor builds differ at the water, and what governs the finished dimensions of any display we quote.
LED wall in Dubrovnik — manufacturing, installation, quote
Dubrovnik is the one Croatian city where the most photographed square metre of wall is also the square metre where a permanent screen will never go. The Old Town inside the City Walls is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and the frontages along the Stradun, around the Pile Gate and up the side stairways are governed accordingly. That does not shrink the market; it moves it. The working commercial city is at Gruž, where the Jadrolinija berths, the bus terminal and the cruise quays put tens of thousands of arriving passengers a day within a hundred metres of each other, and on the Lapad peninsula, where the hotel and conference stock of Babin Kuk sits behind ordinary modern glass. Those are the addresses where a fixed display earns its keep, and they are also the ones where we can build without asking anybody to reinterpret a heritage rule.
Gruž, Lapad and the walled core
Three very different propositions inside one municipality
At Gruž the audience is transient, large and in a hurry: passengers moving between the cruise terminal, the ferry berths and the coach stands read a screen for four or five seconds, from ten to thirty metres, often with the sun behind them. That argues for a bright outdoor build with few words on it. On Lapad and at Babin Kuk the audience is resident for three or four nights, reads from three metres in a lobby, and expects the screen to look like part of the interior rather than an advertisement. Inside the Walls the question is not technical at all. Rules on appearance apply there and applications are decided by the conservation and municipal authorities; our part is limited to survey, drawing, load and consumption figures for the technical annex, and we say nothing about how an application will end.
One journey, not three
How 916 kilometres is planned rather than repeated
A crew that leaves Győr for Dubrovnik is committed to roughly two days on the road before any work begins, so we do not send anybody twice if it can be avoided. The survey is normally done from photographs, a dimensioned sketch and a video call, and the physical visit combines final measurement, mounting, commissioning and the handover session in one stay. The offer states the travel and the per diem as their own lines, separate from the price of the display itself, so you can see exactly what the distance costs and decide whether to bring a second display forward into the same trip. Several clients on this coast have done precisely that - two addresses, one crew, one set of travel lines.
The grid behind the finished size
Multiples of 32 and 16 centimetres, always
Every wall we build is assembled from modules that are 32 centimetres wide and 16 centimetres tall, in that orientation and no other. The consequence is arithmetic rather than taste: the width of your display is a multiple of 32 centimetres and its height a multiple of 16. A recess of 214 by 121 centimetres therefore becomes a 192 by 112 display with a trim, or a 224 by 128 one if the opening can be widened. We would rather establish this at the sketch stage than discover it on a quay in Gruž with a crew standing around, so the first drawing you receive already shows the honest dimension.
Pitch chosen from the standing point
What the viewer's distance dictates
Pixel pitch is a function of how close the nearest serious viewer stands. Inside a reception area or beside a desk, where somebody reads from one to three metres, P1.5 to P2.5 is appropriate. A lobby, a terminal concourse or a restaurant frontage viewed from four to ten metres works at P2.5 to P4. Anything read across a quay, a car park or a road - twelve metres and beyond - is properly served by P4 to P8, and the coarser pitch buys brightness, robustness and a lower price. Ordering a fine pitch for a display nobody approaches is the most common way of spending money on Dalmatian projects without gaining anything visible.
The rolling LED poster for premises that cannot be drilled
A standing digital placard the customer sets up alone
This is the format that answers the 916 kilometres directly. The poster is a portrait unit on a wheeled base: the picture area measures 640 by 1920 millimetres, the frame stands 201 centimetres high, and the whole thing weighs 45 kilograms. Nobody erects scaffolding for it, no access platform is hired, nothing is fixed to a facade and no structural opinion is required, because your own staff wheel it into position and plug it in. A hotel reception on Lapad that cannot lose a wall, a leased unit at the Gruž terminal, a car hire desk or a bank hall all take one without a single fixing. It arrives as P1.5 GOB or P2 GOB for close reading, P2.5 for ordinary indoor use, or a P2.5 outdoor cabinet at 4,500 to 5,000 nits for a covered terrace. The built-in controller joins your network over Wi-Fi or a UTP lead and has an audio output, and because the controllers chain, two units placed together already behave as one picture. Five of them make a 320 by 192 centimetre surface, close to 16:9, at 225 kilograms and about 4 kW at peak - and there is no obligation to buy all five at the start.
Outdoor construction at the edge of the bay
Sealing, output and the salt that never stops
An outdoor display at Gruž or on the approach to the Franjo Tuđman Bridge is sealed to IP65 and runs at an operating brightness of 4,500 to 5,500 nits, which is what it takes to hold a legible image against reflected midday light off the water. Indoors the useful figure is an order of magnitude lower, 700 to 800 nits, and a screen left at outdoor settings in a lobby is simply unpleasant. On this coast the second design question is corrosion: stainless fixings, isolation between dissimilar metals, cable glands facing downwards, and a rear ventilation gap that lets salt-laden air move rather than sit. We also specify a night-time dimming curve at commissioning, because a hotel frontage running at full output at two in the morning generates complaints long before it generates business.
