What follows is an account of how a fixed LED surface behaves in Izola: which parts of the municipality can carry one and which realistically cannot, why the tile arithmetic settles the finished measurements before a carpenter is called, how the tile is chosen from the place a viewer stands, what salt air does to hardware left facing it, where a castored poster takes the installation question away entirely, and how work 520 kilometres by road from Győr gets surveyed, priced and looked after afterwards.
LED wall in Izola — manufacturing, installation, quote
Izola is really two places sharing one postcode. There is the peninsula: Manziolijev trg with the Manzioli Palace and the seat of the Italian Self-Governing National Community, the baroque Besenghi degli Ughi Palace, Veliki trg, Trg svetega Mavra and the lanes off Ljubljanska ulica, where the frontages are old, the streets are narrow and nobody can stand far enough back to look at a large picture. Then there is the rim: Sončno nabrežje along the water, Marina Izola, the San Simon Resort in Simon's Bay, the Belvedere terraces above the town, the General Hospital campus and the redeveloping cannery quarter left behind by Delamaris and Arrigoni. A permanent screen almost always belongs to the second Izola, and the sooner a buyer accepts that, the less design work gets thrown away.
Two Izolas, two entirely different briefs
The peninsula and the rim do not take the same equipment
Inside the old core the honest answer is usually a small one. Frontages on Manziolijev trg and around Trg svetega Mavra are historic, several are listed, and a calle that measures four metres across gives a passer-by no chance of seeing a two-metre picture as a picture — only a fragment of one. Adding a bright rectangle to a baroque elevation would look wrong even where it was allowed. What does work here is modest and internal: a compact surface set behind a shop window, a screen inside a wine bar or a gallery, a display in a hotel lobby, or a free-standing unit that touches no fabric at all. The rim is a different commercial proposition altogether. Around Marina Izola, on the approach to San Simon Resort, at the hospital entrance and along the wider stretches of Sončno nabrežje there are modern buildings, forecourts, car parks and genuine sightlines of fifteen to forty metres. That is where a permanent installation can be given a sensible size, aimed at people who still have a decision in front of them rather than people who have already arrived and parked.
Arithmetic of the module, settled before anything is built
Thirty-two across, sixteen high, and no arithmetic in between
Every module we build lies on its side: 32 centimetres of width, 16 of height. Stack them and the arithmetic is unforgiving. A picture is so many tiles across by so many tiles down, so widths run 1.60, 1.92, 2.24, 2.56 metres and heights climb 1.12, 1.28, 1.44 — ask for 2.20 by 1.30 and no combination on earth produces it. The pinch point is refurbishment, which is most of the work here. In a hotel wall, behind a reception counter, in a stone reveal inside one of the converted cannery buildings, somebody has already drawn a round figure that the tiles do not contain. Give us the space you have plus whatever slack you can accept, and we will hand back the two or three tile counts that sit inside it, with the mass and the current draw for each. Timber and plasterboard swallow the shortfall in the surround; cut stone does not, and that is a thing to settle before a mason lifts a tool.
Pitch taken from the viewer's feet
Nearest viewer first, catalogue second
Begin with the closest person who will ever look at the thing, because that is the reading position where a specification fails. Half a metre away behind glass on Ljubljanska ulica, a coarse tile stops being a picture and becomes a lattice of dots, so P1.5, P2 or at the outside P2.5. Six to eight metres — a hotel lobby at San Simon, a meeting room, a restaurant floor — is served comfortably by P2.5, P3 or P4. Thirty metres and upwards, meaning the marina car park or a reading position across the harbour basin, sits in P4 through to P8, and a finer tile at that range buys resolution the eye has no way of collecting. A rough conversion is useful when an enquiry is still on the telephone: take the pitch figure in millimetres and read it as the closest comfortable viewing range in metres. It is approximate, but it stops a great many buyers specifying an outdoor surface as though somebody were going to press their nose against it. Give us the two extreme positions — the nearest reader and the furthest — and the band picks itself.
Salt, glare and a season that does the year's work in four months
What actually fails first on this coast
Anything facing the weather here is built to IP65, with glanded entries and a lower edge that sheds water instead of collecting it, and it has to punch through glare coming off the sea. The working range outdoors runs from about 4,500 nits up towards 5,500 at the height of a July afternoon, then drops steeply on a dimming curve once the light goes, because output that is barely sufficient at midday is intolerable on a quiet waterfront at ten at night. The pixels are rarely what gives out. Salt aerosol carries several hundred metres inland from Sončno nabrežje and finds fasteners, brackets and cabinet seams long before it finds electronics. Stainless fixings, dissimilar metals kept apart, sealed cable entries and a scheduled freshwater rinse are what separate a five-year installation from a twelve-year one. The second local factor is duty cycle: Izola earns most of its trade between May and September, so we size cooling and set the dimming curve for the summer peak rather than for an annual average that never actually occurs.
The rolling LED poster, and the buildings it saves you from touching
A castored frame 201 centimetres tall, and no mark left on the building
For a great many Izola addresses this is the whole answer. Picture a slim upright board standing on its own wheeled foot: 640 millimetres across the image and 1,920 millimetres up it, 201 centimetres to the top of the frame, 45 kilograms all in. You roll it where you want it and put the plug in the wall. There is no scaffold to hire, no platform, no bracket going into anybody's elevation, no engineer's opinion to obtain, and on the day it leaves nothing has been marked. Across 520 road kilometres that distinction is worth real money. Fixing a surface to a wall means somebody surveys it, somebody prepares the position, a crew sleeps in a hotel and a date is held in a diary — a fortnight of calendar before a single pixel lights up. This ships on a pallet and your own staff have it working the week it lands. Concretely: the wine bar on Manziolijev trg that reprints an A0 board every time the list changes; the outpatient hall at the General Hospital with its wall of laminated notices; a San Simon reception desk that must greet a conference group at nine and a family at four; a marina office publishing berth information without asking anyone for leave to drill.
Five hundred and twenty kilometres, shown as separate lines
What the survey, the fitting, the cover and the shelf spares come to
Between our Győr premises and Izola lie 520 kilometres of road, and we treat any fixed installation as a two-day operation with a night's sleep in the middle. Somebody who has spent seven hours at the wheel should not be drilling into a hotel elevation the same afternoon; that is precisely where expensive mistakes are made. Surveys get cheaper if you help us: sharp photographs of the position, a sketch with the dimensions written on it and a shot of the consumer unit will frequently let us quote without setting out at all. Where a visit really is needed, we try to hang it on other Slovenian coastal work in the same week. Everything the distance costs is written out in the open. Mileage, hours worked away from base and the overnight allowance take a row each, and they sit outside the equipment total rather than inside it — you ought to be able to lay our offer beside one from Koper or Ljubljana and see exactly where the two diverge. Warranty comes to twelve or to twenty-four months, decided by how the wall is configured. Reserve tiles ship with the order, and at this range that is the provision that matters most: a dead module ought to occupy an Izola electrician for three quarters of an hour, not put a van on the motorway in Hungary.
