Below we set out what a permanently installed LED surface at a Slovenj Gradec address involves: how the finished dimensions come about, which pixel pitch belongs to a hospital foyer as opposed to a roadside position on Celjska cesta, what the valley climate demands of an enclosure, and where a wheeled LED poster is the more sensible purchase than anything screwed to a building. The panels are built at our works in Győr, 314 road kilometres away, and every cost that the distance creates is shown to you as a separate line.
LED wall in Slovenj Gradec — manufacturing, installation, quote
Slovenj Gradec has roughly seven and a half thousand residents, and that figure alone would never justify a large display. The catchment does. The general hospital serves the whole of Koroška, the Koroška Gallery of Fine Arts and the regional museum collection in the Cultural Centre draw visitors from well beyond the Mislinja valley, and the town carries administrative functions for Dravograd, Ravne na Koroškem and Prevalje. A permanent surface here is therefore not read by the townspeople. It is read by a rotating regional public that arrives by car over the Huda Luknja pass or down the valley road, stays for an appointment or an afternoon, and leaves again.
The catchment behind a town of seven and a half thousand
Who is actually standing in front of the surface
Three kinds of viewer matter here, and they want different things. The first is a patient or a relative at the hospital, who is anxious, unfamiliar with the building and looking for a department name rather than a promotion. The second is a visitor to the gallery or to Rotenturn manor, who has time and will read a longer text. The third is a driver on the valley road with four seconds of attention. Almost every disappointing installation we are asked to fix was specified for one of these and then used by another. Before any dimension is discussed, decide which of the three pays for the screen. If the answer is the hospital corridor, the surface will be small, close and quiet. If it is the approach from Šmartno pri Slovenj Gradcu or Pameče, it will be large, bright and almost wordless. A single installation that tries to serve both ends up too coarse for the first reader and too detailed for the second.
The tile that settles your finished dimensions
Landscape units of 32 by 16 centimetres
Our building block never turns on its side: it measures 32 centimetres horizontally and 16 vertically. The finished width is consequently a whole number of 32-centimetre steps and the finished height a whole number of 16-centimetre steps, with nothing available between them. This is worth knowing before an architect draws a recess, because a niche of 2.35 metres cannot be filled exactly. Seven units give 224 centimetres and eight give 256, so either the surround absorbs the difference or the opening is set out to suit the grid. In practice we ask for the rough opening early and return two or three permitted sizes with the module count for each. The height works the same way: 96, 112 or 128 centimetres, never 105. Where a client insists on a specific outside dimension, the extra is taken up in the frame and the trim, not in the picture area.
Reading distance in a foyer against reading distance on Celjska cesta
Pitch follows the nearest serious viewer
Pixel pitch is a distance decision, not a quality ranking. Where people come within a few metres of the surface, as at a reception desk or in an exhibition room, P1.5 to P2.5 is the sensible band. For a hall, a lecture room or a shop interior read from the middle of the space, P2.5 to P4 does the work. For anything read from a carriageway, a car park or across a junction, P4 to P8 is correct and finer pitches simply cost more without being visible. The method we use is to walk the site and note where the nearest person who genuinely has to read the content will stand, not the closest point anybody could theoretically reach. In the outpatient area of the hospital that might be two metres. On a frontage facing the valley road it might be thirty. Those two answers produce entirely different quotations, which is why we ask for them before pricing anything.
Valley air, winter fog and what the enclosure has to survive
Sealed and bright outside, restrained inside
The Mislinja valley holds moisture. Autumn and winter mornings bring long periods of fog, the ground stays damp under the slopes of Uršlja gora, and the temperature swing between a still night and a sunlit afternoon is considerable. An outdoor surface here is therefore specified at IP65 with sealed cable entries, a drained lower edge and a mounting that leaves an air gap behind the panels so that warm air can move. Operating brightness is 4,500 to 5,500 nits, which is what a bright overcast sky demands; the same figure at ten at night would be intolerable, so the dimming curve is set during commissioning and recorded. Indoor positions are a different specification altogether. Panels run at 700 to 800 nits, the sealing requirement disappears, and the fixing becomes a question of what the plasterboard or the masonry will carry. Condensation, not cold, is what damages equipment in this valley, and it is dealt with by ventilation and by never switching a screen fully off in winter.
The rolling LED poster instead of anything fitted
Forty-five kilograms on castors and an ordinary socket
A large part of what Slovenj Gradec needs is not a wall at all. The LED poster is an upright digital placard on a wheeled foot, 45 kilograms in weight, which the buyer positions and plugs into a normal socket. There is no scaffolding, no access platform, no fixing into a facade and no structural opinion to obtain, so nobody from our works has to be present when it is put into service. In the outpatient corridor at the hospital, in the foyer of the Cultural Centre on Glavni trg, or in a pharmacy or bank branch on Ronkova ulica, it replaces the printed board and the roll-up banner without altering the building in any way. It is also not a dead end. The controllers are made to be sequenced, so several units standing side by side behave as one continuous picture rather than as a row of separate screens showing the same loop. That means one unit is a reasonable place to start and a larger surface remains available later. Across 314 kilometres the practical difference is stark: a fitted wall needs a survey, a preparation day and a booked installation slot, while a poster travels on a pallet and is working within days of the order.
Three hundred and fourteen kilometres, set out line by line
Survey, installation, warranty and the spares in the crate
The road distance from our works to Slovenj Gradec is 314 kilometres, which is a long single day rather than an overnight job for most tasks. A survey is normally combined with another Slovenian visit in the same week, and where the client can send photographs, measurements and a photograph of the distribution board, we can often price without travelling at all. For a fitted installation on a facade we plan the survey and the fitting as two separate journeys, because measuring and drilling on the same day produces mistakes. On a cross-border quotation the mileage and the subsistence appear as their own rows and are never buried in the price of the surface, so you can see exactly what the distance costs and compare it with a local offer. The warranty is one or two years depending on the configuration, and reserve modules travel with the delivery in the same crate. That matters more than the warranty period itself: a failed module is a ten-minute swap that a local electrician can carry out, which is precisely why we send the spares rather than keeping them here.
