A permanently installed LED surface is a building component with a ten-year life, and the questions worth asking before ordering one are mostly not about the technology. On this page we work through them in the order they actually arise: who is standing in front of it, how big it can be given the grid it is built from, what pitch that viewing distance justifies, what an industrial hall demands that a shop does not, whether a chainable poster set removes the installation problem altogether, and what 398 road kilometres from our Győr works adds to the timetable and the offer.
LED wall in Kamnik — manufacturing, installation, quote
Kamnik carries two quite different populations past the same shop windows. On weekday mornings a large part of the town leaves for Ljubljana and comes back after six, so the frontages along Šutna and around Glavni trg have almost no daytime audience; at weekends the same street fills with people on their way to Kamniška Bistrica, up to Velika planina or out to the Arboretum Volčji Potok, who have never been here before and will not be back for a year. Meanwhile the working town is somewhere else entirely, in the industrial districts at Duplica and Perovo, where a display faces employees rather than customers. Anybody buying a fixed LED surface in Kamnik has to decide which of those three audiences it is for, because the right answer for one is the wrong answer for the others.
Who is the surface actually speaking to?
Three audiences, and only one of them is yours
A display in a Duplica production hall exists to tell a shift what is happening, and it is read by the same forty people every day. A display facing Glavni trg is read once by somebody who is passing through on a Saturday and will not see it again. A display in a reception area is read by a visitor who is waiting and has time. These are not variations on one product. They differ in pitch, in brightness, in how often content changes and in who is responsible for changing it. Answer this question first, in one sentence, and everything below it follows; skip it and you will buy the wrong specification competently.
How is the finished size arrived at?
A landscape tile of 32 by 16 centimetres, never rotated
The surface is assembled from identical tiles that are always laid landscape: 32 centimetres wide, 16 centimetres tall. That fixes the arithmetic completely. Width comes in 32 centimetre steps, height in 16 centimetre steps, and there is no intermediate size. A run of wall 2.56 metres wide and 1.44 metres high is eight tiles by nine, exactly. Where the available opening does not divide cleanly, the difference is absorbed by the frame and the surround rather than by distorting the picture. This is also why the site measurement has to be real: a drawing that is twenty millimetres out will not change the tile count, but it will change whether the finished frame fits the recess.
What pitch does the viewing distance justify?
Measure it, rather than choosing from a price list
Pitch is chosen from the closest point at which somebody will read the surface seriously. Under about three metres, in a reception or beside a counter, P1.5 to P2.5 is warranted. Between roughly five and ten metres, which covers most halls and shop interiors, P2.5 to P4 is right. Beyond that, on a frontage or across a yard, P4 to P8 is honest and much cheaper. The most expensive mistake in this category is buying a fine pitch for a surface that nobody ever stands close to, and the second most expensive is buying a coarse one for a foyer where people wait a metre away.
What does an industrial position demand that a shop does not?
Dust, three shifts and a supply designed for machines
The manufacturing addresses around Duplica and Perovo bring their own requirements. Airborne dust settles on a display face and on ventilation openings, so the specification usually moves to a sealed construction even indoors, and cleaning intervals go into the handover sheet. A surface that runs across three shifts needs a dimming schedule, because the interior level of 700 to 800 nits that suits a daytime hall is uncomfortable at three in the morning. And the electrical supply in an older hall was laid out for machines, not for a display on a timer, so the wall usually gets its own protected way rather than sharing one.
Can one unit be bought now and the display enlarged later?
Five chained posters make a picture 320 by 192 centimetres
Yes, and for a good many Kamnik buyers this is the sensible route. The rolling LED poster is an upright unit on a wheeled base that needs no fixing to the building, but the part that gets overlooked is that its controller can be chained. Several posters stood side by side do not have to show the same clip repeated: they can be driven as a single image surface. The arrangement people settle on most often is five panels, each 64 centimetres wide, making a continuous picture 320 centimetres across and 192 centimetres high, which is close enough to sixteen by nine to take ordinary video without cropping. That means you need not commit to the final size on day one. Buy one for a shop entrance on Šutna or a hotel lobby this season, see whether it earns its place, and add units afterwards. There is no scaffolding, no access platform, no facade fixing and no structural report at any stage of that, which at 398 kilometres from the works is the difference between a project and a delivery.
What has to be ready on your side, and by when?
Three visits, three short lists that belong to you
Three journeys are made to Kamnik, and each one has a list attached to it that is yours rather than ours. Before the first, the survey, one person with authority has to be present for an hour: the mounting position, the power route and who will own the content afterwards get settled in that hour, or they get settled badly a month later. Before the second, the working area has to be clear, the protected circuit has to exist and terminate where the drawing says it does, and somebody has to be able to open the Duplica or Perovo building at seven in the morning. Before the third, the only item usually outstanding is the content itself, which is also the one most often forgotten. The reason there are three visits and not one is 398 road kilometres: five hours behind the wheel before any work begins is why the crew books a night here rather than turning straight round, and why we would sooner start a fitting at eight in the morning than at four in the afternoon. What that costs sits on the offer as its own group of lines - the road, the crew's meals, the room - kept clear of the figure for the surface, so that you can weigh the two apart from each other. Alongside the panels the pallet carries replacement tiles cut from the same production run, because one ordered in three years' time comes off a newer batch and rarely matches its neighbours exactly. Cover runs to one or two years, set by the build you choose.
