LED wall

An LED wall is not one screen. It is a grid of identical panels — most commonly 500mm square — locked together into whatever shape the room will take, then driven as a single picture by a processor. Change the panel count and you change the screen size; there is no fixed size to choose from.

The reason it has largely replaced projection at corporate events is light. A projector fights every other light source in the room, which is why rooms get darkened and why a projected slide looks grey next to a lit stage. An LED wall emits its own light, so it holds up under full house lighting, under a lit podium, and outdoors in the afternoon.

What it costs you is weight and power. Panels hang from truss or stack on a ground-support frame, and both need rigging points or floor space planned before the room is set. A wall of any size also needs its own power run rather than a wall socket. Neither is difficult, but both are decisions made at the site survey, not on the morning of the show.

The specification that actually matters is not size but pixel pitch, which decides how close an audience can sit before the picture stops being a picture.

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

• 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.
• LED panel (cabinet) The individual module an LED wall is built from — typically 500mm square, hung or stacked in a grid, and the unit everything about a wall is counted in.
• IMAG (image magnification) Live camera feed of whoever is on stage, put up on the screens so the back of the room can see a face instead of a distant figure.
• Rear projection Projecting from behind the screen instead of in front of it, so nobody walks through the beam and no presenter is ever lit up by the projector.