LED panel (cabinet)

A panel, or cabinet, is one tile of an LED wall. The common format is 500mm by 500mm, so a wall four panels high and eight wide is two metres by four. Quotes, truck space, power draw and rigging load are all counted in panels rather than in square metres, because the panel is the thing that physically exists.

Panels lock to each other mechanically and pass both data and power along the chain, which is what lets a crew build a large wall from a stack of identical parts. Some ranges curve, letting a wall bend around a corner or form a shallow arc, at the cost of a more careful build.

Two practical consequences follow. A wall is only available in multiples of a panel, so a screen cannot be made 10% wider to suit a room — it changes by whole panels or not at all. And a job should carry spare panels. A single dead cabinet in the middle of a grid is a visible black square, and swapping one in takes minutes if it is on the truck and ruins the look of the show if it is not.

LED video wall rental — owned inventory, our own crew, and a site survey before anything is specified.

• LED wall A screen built from modular LED panels bolted together, bright enough to read in daylight and sized to the room rather than to a projector lens.
• Pixel pitch The distance in millimetres between the centres of two adjacent LEDs — the number that decides how close your audience can sit, not how good the screen is.