Permanent LED walls for Zadar, indoors and out. On this page we work through the questions that decide a specification in a coastal city: what the distance from our workshop means in practice, what salt-laden air does to an enclosure, how bright a screen has to be under an Adriatic sun and how quickly it should come down again after dark, which pitch belongs to which sightline, and why the finished dimensions are not a free choice.
LED wall in Zadar — manufacturing, installation, quote
Croatia · 596 km from our plant in Győr
Zadar is a compressed old town on a narrow peninsula, surrounded by a much larger modern city that spreads inland and along the coast. That layout decides where a permanent screen can realistically go. Inside the walls, along Kalelarga and around the Roman Forum, the streets are stone-lined, pedestrian and closely governed, and the appropriate installation is small, discreet and mostly indoors. The larger surfaces belong to the ring outside: the concourse of Supernova Zadar, the sports complex around the Krešimir Ćosić Hall, the approach roads, the terminal buildings at the ferry port. A client who describes the project simply as a screen in Zadar is usually describing two entirely different jobs, and the first thing we ask is which side of that boundary the address falls on.
What does 574 kilometres change about a survey and a repair?
A preparation day, an overnight stay, itemised travel
Zadar is 574 road kilometres from our workshop near Győr, and there is no useful way to pretend that this is a morning's drive. It means that a survey visit is planned rather than improvised, that installation crews travel the day before and stay overnight, and that a repair is scheduled into a window instead of being promised for tomorrow afternoon. We would rather set that expectation at the quotation stage than disappoint it later. The practical response is to reduce the number of journeys. A survey collects everything at once, including measurements, photographs from every viewing position, the state of the substrate, the route for cabling, the available power and the access constraints. Spare modules from the same batch travel with the wall so that the commonest fault can be resolved locally without any journey at all. The distance appears in the offer as its own line, together with the crew's subsistence allowance, and is never folded into a square-metre price.
How does sea air change the specification?
Salt, humidity and what it attacks first
Salt-laden air does not attack the diodes. It attacks everything holding them: fixings, brackets, hinges, cable glands and the frame behind the modules. On the peninsula and along the waterfront the sensible specification therefore uses stainless steel fixings throughout, powder-coated or marine-grade aluminium for the structure, and cable entries sealed with glands that face downwards, and it treats the rear face of the enclosure as seriously as the front. The enclosure rating for an outdoor position remains IP65, which excludes driving rain and windblown spray, but the maintenance interval is what really differs from an inland site. A screen a few hundred metres from open water accumulates a salt film that reduces output and, more importantly, sits on every metal surface. An annual clean and inspection is not an upsell here; it is the difference between a screen that lasts a decade and one that starts shedding brackets in its fifth year.
How bright must a screen be facing the Adriatic sun, and how dim after it sets?
Two settings, not one number
An outdoor wall in Zadar is specified at 4,500 to 5,500 nit. That figure exists for a July afternoon on a west-facing surface with light bouncing off water and pale stone, which is about as demanding as a screen ever gets in this part of Europe. Anything significantly lower washes out, and a client who has only ever seen the screen indoors will be surprised by how much output the sun consumes. The evening is the other half of the specification and is more often got wrong. Zadar's centre fills after sunset, and the crowd that gathers around the Sea Organ and the Greeting to the Sun is standing in near-darkness with adapted eyes. A screen anywhere near that setting must run at a small percentage of its daytime maximum, on an automatic curve set during commissioning. Indoors, in a shop or a foyer, the operating level is a different order of magnitude altogether, at 700 to 800 nit.
Which pitch belongs to the sightline you actually have?
Measure from the nearest viewer, not the furthest
Pixel pitch is the gap between adjacent diodes and it is set by the closest position from which anyone will look at the screen. In a shop interior on Kalelarga, or a display behind a counter where customers stand within two or three metres, the 1.5 to 2.5 millimetre band is the right one; below that distance the eye resolves individual points and text loses its solidity. A concourse or a hall, read from something like five to fifteen metres, is served by 2.5 to 4 millimetres, which is the usual choice for an interior screen in a retail centre or a sports venue foyer. Outdoors, where the nearest viewer is across a road or on the far side of a plaza and the furthest is fifty metres back, 4 to 8 millimetres is correct and brings real advantages in brightness, durability and cost. The temptation is always to buy a finer pitch than the position needs; it is money spent on detail that nobody standing there can see.
Why are the finished dimensions not a free choice?
Everything is a multiple of 32 and 16 centimetres
Our modules are always mounted in landscape orientation and measure 32 centimetres wide by 16 centimetres high. A finished wall is therefore an exact multiple of 32 across and of 16 in height. A screen 4.48 metres wide and 2.56 metres high is fourteen modules by sixteen and is entirely ordinary; a screen 4.5 by 2.5 metres does not exist and cannot be made to exist by trimming a tile. This matters most where the screen goes into a prepared opening, a recess or an existing frame, because the builder's dimension and the module dimension have to be reconciled before either is fixed. We do that at the drawing stage, usually by rounding the module count down and making up the difference with a surround. It is a five minute conversation before manufacture and a very expensive one afterwards.
Where does a rolling poster fit into a 574 kilometre project?
One upright unit, or five standing together
The honest comparison at this distance is between a build that keeps our people on the coast for two days and a display that needs nobody at all. The poster ships, stands on its castors and runs from a socket. Sizing is simple as well: the arrangement buyers ask for most often is five units standing together, giving a picture 320 centimetres wide and 192 high, close to 16:9, weighing 225 kilograms altogether and drawing up to 4 kilowatts at full white. That is a lot of picture for a lobby. A retailer on Kalelarga is usually better served by one or two, and the arithmetic goes in whole units rather than in modules.
