LED Wall Rental: How to Choose Pixel Pitch and Size for Your Event

LED walls have replaced projection on most Utah stages because they are bright, seamless and scale to any shape. They are also easy to get wrong: too coarse a pitch for the front row, too small for the back row, or content built at the wrong resolution. Here is how we size a wall for a client, in the order we actually decide it.

Pixel pitch, in plain terms

Pixel pitch is the distance between LED pixels in millimeters. Smaller pitch means more pixels per tile, a sharper image up close and a higher price. The working rule is that a wall looks seamless from roughly 10 feet away per 3mm of pitch, so:

• 1.5mm fine pitch looks solid from about 5 feet. Use it for broadcast sets, trade show walls, product reveals and any scenic people walk up to. Mitered corner tiles let us build cubes, columns and 90-degree returns.
• 2.9mm indoor is the workhorse. It reads clean from about 10 feet, which covers ballroom and theater stages, arena sets and general sessions.
• 3.9mm outdoor is IP65 rated and bright enough for daylight. From 13 feet and beyond it looks as sharp as the indoor product, and festival crowds are much farther than that.

Sizing the wall to the room

Tiles are 500mm square, just under 20 inches, so walls grow in 20 inch steps in any ratio. For a 16:9 picture the common builds are:

• 6 by 4 tiles, about 10 by 6.5 feet. Breakouts, small ballrooms, booth headers.
• 10 by 6 tiles, about 16.5 by 10 feet. The standard general-session center screen for 300 to 800 seats.
• 14 by 8 tiles, about 23 by 13 feet. Large ballrooms and theaters, often with two side screens for IMAG.
• 20 by 11 tiles, about 33 by 18 feet. Arena and festival main-stage walls.

The back-row test: the screen height should be at least one sixth of the distance to the farthest seat. If the last row is 120 feet away, you want a wall around 20 feet tall, or side screens to split the room.

Content and processing

Every wall gets a pixel map before anyone designs a slide. A 10 by 6 tile wall at 2.9mm is 1,720 by 1,032 pixels, close enough to 1080p that standard decks scale cleanly; the same wall at 3.9mm is 1,280 by 768. Ultra-wide walls, columns and cubes need custom canvases, and we send the template to your designer. On the hardware side, 4K LED processors with redundant outputs drive the tiles, a screen-management switcher handles multiple screens and sources, and our LED technician maps, color-matches and tests your content before rehearsal.

Indoor or outdoor, flown or ground-stacked

Indoors, walls fly from truss on chain hoists or ground-stack on engineered bases. Outdoors they hang from truss or a mobile-stage roof, or ground-stack with ballast, and the IP65 tiles shrug off rain and dust. Either way the rigging is engineered to the venue, and outdoor walls get a wind plan.

What an LED wall rental costs in Utah

LED is priced per tile per day, plus processing, rigging or ground support, power, crew and transport. Fine-pitch tiles carry a premium over standard indoor and outdoor tiles, and a processor package and an LED technician are added per show. A small indoor wall with processing and a tech is a modest line item, a general-session wall is a mid-sized one, and a festival main-stage wall with side screens is a major one. Multi-day events do not pay the full daily rate every day, and we quote line by line so you can see where the money goes.

LED wall or projector?

LED wins in bright rooms, for daylight outdoors and for seamless wide or shaped walls. Projection still wins on cost for a single 16:9 screen in a darkened ballroom, and we carry 5K to 20K lumen laser projectors for exactly that. When it is close we quote both.

See tile types, processing, cameras and our broadcast trucks on the LED wall rental page, or send us the room and the content and we will size the wall for you.