What pixel pitch is
Pixel pitch is the distance between the centres of two adjacent pixels, measured in millimetres. A 1.5 mm product has its pixel centres 1.5 mm apart in both directions, which works out at 444 444 pixels per square metre.
It is written as a bare number — P1.5, 1.5 mm, or just “a 1.5” — and it is the single figure that decides how close a viewer can stand before the image stops being an image and starts being a grid of dots. Everything else on the data sheet describes how well the product does its job. Pitch describes what job it can do at all.
Pitch is measured centre to centre, not edge to edge. Two products can share a pitch and look completely different up close depending on how the packages are spaced within it — which is the subject of the packaging guide.
Why the numbers are odd
Older products had round pitches: 3 mm, 4 mm, 6 mm, 10 mm. Modern fine-pitch products do not — 0.9375, 1.25, 1.5625, 1.875. Those look like manufacturing tolerances but they are not. They are the result of the specification being written backwards.
A maker starts with two decisions: a cabinet 600 mm wide, and a wall that must tile exactly to a named resolution. Divide 600 mm by 640 pixels and you get 0.9375. Divide it by 384 and you get 1.5625. The pitch is whatever falls out of choosing a clean pixel count for the cabinet, because a wall that lands on 3 840 × 2 160 exactly is worth more than one that lands on 3 812 × 2 148.
This matters when you are quoting. Rounding 1.5625 to “1.5” in a specification is the kind of small inaccuracy that turns into an argument at handover, because the resolution you promised will not be the resolution the wall has.
Pitch, size and resolution
Three figures, and any two of them fix the third:
- Pixels across one cabinet = cabinet width ÷ pitch. A 600 mm cabinet at 1.25 mm is 480 pixels wide.
- Pixels across the wall = pixels per cabinet × cabinets across. Eight of those cabinets is 3 840 pixels — 4K, exactly.
- Wall width = cabinet width × cabinets across. Those eight cabinets are 4 800 mm wide.
This is why the useful question is rarely “what pitch?” on its own. It is “what pitch, in what cabinet, to hit what resolution, at what size?” — and the answer is a grid of whole cabinets, because half a cabinet is not a thing you can buy.
| Pitch | Pixels per 600 mm cabinet | Cabinets to reach 3 840 px | Wall width at 4K |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.78125 mm | 768 | 5 | 3.00 m |
| 0.9375 mm | 640 | 6 | 3.60 m |
| 1.25 mm | 480 | 8 | 4.80 m |
| 1.5625 mm | 384 | 10 | 6.00 m |
| 1.875 mm | 320 | 12 | 7.20 m |
Read that table the other way round and it becomes a sizing method: the wall you can fit decides the pitch that gives you 4K, not the other way round. That is what the configurator’s resolution mode does — pick 4K, and it tells you the grid, and says plainly when a cabinet cannot get there exactly.
Choosing a pitch
The honest rule of thumb is that pixels stop being individually resolvable at roughly pitch × 3.4 metres. That comes from human visual acuity: one arcminute of arc is about 1/3438 of a radian, so a 1.5 mm pitch disappears at about 5.2 m. Below that distance a sharp-eyed viewer can still pick out structure; above it they physically cannot.
Most data sheets print something much closer than that — often pitch × 1, sometimes pitch × 0.5 — which is a comfort figure, not an optical one. Both are useful, they just answer different questions.
| Pitch | Where it belongs | Pixels merge at |
|---|---|---|
| 0.6 – 0.9 mm | Control rooms, broadcast studios, desks facing the wall | 2.1 – 3.1 m |
| 1.0 – 1.5 mm | Boardrooms, reception walls, retail people walk up to | 3.4 – 5.2 m |
| 1.6 – 2.6 mm | Auditoria, showrooms, concourses | 5.5 – 8.9 m |
| 2.6 – 4.0 mm | Rental and staging, shopping centres, arena ribbons | 8.9 – 13.8 m |
| 4.0 – 10.4 mm | Outdoor billboards, stadium main screens, roadside | 13.8 – 35.8 m |
The over-specification trap
The most common mistake in this trade is quoting a finer pitch than the room needs, and it is expensive in a way the customer only discovers later.
Halving the pitch quadruples the pixel count per square metre. Four times the LED packages, four times the driver channels, four times the data the receiving card has to move. It does not quite quadruple the price, but it moves it more than most people expect — and it buys nothing at all if the nearest viewer is eight metres away, because at eight metres a 2.5 and a 1.2 look identical.
The defensible way to specify is to measure the closest a viewer will realistically stand, divide by 3.4, and take the next pitch up from the answer. If the room says 1.9 mm, quote a 1.875 and put the saving into brightness, a better processor, or spares.
The exception is a wall that will be on camera. A broadcast or virtual-production wall is specified for the lens, not the eye, and that is a genuinely different calculation involving sensor resolution and camera distance.
What pitch does to price
Fine-pitch product is priced per cabinet, not per square metre — that changed as cabinet formats standardised, and per-square-metre survives mainly for outdoor and rental stock. The consequence for a quotation is that going finer does not just raise the rate; it raises the number of cabinets too, because finer product usually comes in smaller cabinets.
Two changes compound, which is why the difference between a 1.25 and a 1.5625 quote is bigger than the pitch difference suggests. It also means a pitch change is never a single line edit on an offer: the cabinet count, the receiving cards, the weight, the power and the shipping all move with it. That is the whole argument for pricing a wall from its geometry rather than from a spreadsheet cell.
What pitch does not tell you
Two products at the same pitch can be entirely different things. Pitch says nothing about:
- Brightness. 600 nits and 1 500 nits are both sold at 1.5 mm, for indoor and sunlit-lobby jobs respectively.
- Refresh rate. 1 920 Hz and 7 680 Hz look the same to the eye and completely different through a camera shutter.
- Packaging. COB, MIP, IMD and SMD at the same pitch differ in contrast, viewing angle, durability and price.
- Greyscale at low brightness. The figure that decides whether a dimmed wall shows banding, and the one least often published.
- Serviceability. Front-access versus rear-access decides whether a failed module in a recessed wall is a ten-minute job or a scaffold.
A specification that names only a pitch has not specified anything yet. It has named a price bracket.