How to Choose an LED Pixel Pitch

Pixel pitch is the distance between LED pixels, in millimetres. It decides how close people can stand, how many pixels you have to design with, and a large part of what the wall costs. It's usually chosen before a designer is in the room, which is a pity, because it shapes everything that follows.

The rules of thumb disagree

No standards body publishes this rule. It comes from manufacturers, and their multipliers differ:

• Christie allows about one metre of minimum viewing distance per millimetre of pitch.
• Daktronics puts optimal viewing distance in feet at about three times the pitch in millimetres.
• Planar gives a 10x rule, pitch times ten for the distance in feet, and a visual acuity formula, pitch times 3438 for the distance in millimetres.

Run a 3.9mm wall through those and you get about 3.9 metres, 3.6 metres, 11.9 metres and 13.4 metres. That spread isn't an error. The lower numbers are roughly where the picture holds together, and the higher ones are closer to where a person with good eyesight stops being able to see pixels at all.

How to use them

Find the closest person who matters. If that's a presenter's guests in the front row or a visitor at a stand, use the higher figures, especially if there's fine UI or small type. If everyone is well back and the content is big image and big type, the lower figures are fine.

Don't pay for pitch nobody can see. Don't choose a coarser wall and then ask it to carry a dashboard either.

What it does to your design

Pitch sets your canvas. A wall 12 metres wide at 2.6mm is about 4,600 pixels across, and it may be far from any standard video format. Get the exact pixel map, not a ratio, before you design anything. For the BYD Seal 7 launch, the screen was an 11K ultra-wide curve, and content that wide has to be composed and rendered for that canvas from the start.

Coarse pitch also changes how small things look. Thin lines shimmer, small type breaks up and fine gradients show steps. Once you know your pitch, test your smallest type and thinnest line on it at full size.

From there, read Designing for the 40-Metre Screen for layout, and Why Your LED Wall Looks Different from Your Monitor for colour. Our conference content work starts from these numbers.