LED screens for airports and stations

In an airport or a railway station the screen is read on the move, suitcase in hand, from twenty metres away. What matters here is not fine grain but area, brightness headroom and legible type: departure and arrival boards, terminal wayfinding, carrier announcements and advertising in the passenger flow. One canvas covers all of that and is divided into zones instead of breaking up into a dozen separate monitors with bezels.

KazLedPro has worked with LED screens since 2012. We installed the LED screen in the hall of Karaganda airport in October 2020: 256×256 mm modules, a minimum viewing distance of four metres, with site video on the case page. Comparable high-traffic halls include the Forum shopping centre in Almaty (48 m², P3, 2023) and Aport Mall (64 m², P3, 2023), and from the transport sector the Academy of Logistics and Transport in Almaty (2022).

Model selection, steel structure, installation by our own crew, commissioning and service come under one contract. A module stock in Almaty, more than 1,000 projects across Kazakhstan, 62 of them with photos on the site. Board size and resolution for your hall can be estimated with the calculator on the site, and a commercial proposal with the equipment list is ready within a day.

Pixel pitch and line height for a hall read on the move

Pitch is chosen by the farthest point of the hall, not by the front row. At two to three metres, at a check-in desk or a boarding gate, P2.5 works — a density of 160,000 dots/m². For a waiting hall or a gallery viewed from four metres and beyond, P3 or P4 is enough: a 256×256 mm module gives 62,500 dots/m², and exactly those modules run at Karaganda airport. The P3 320×160 mm module has a 160 by 160 degree viewing angle, so a line stays readable from an oblique walkway along the gallery.

Legibility is counted in pixels, not by eye. In our practice a timetable line reads confidently when the character height is at least twenty-five pixels: ten centimetres at P4, six at P2.5. That sets the minimum canvas height — eight flight rows with line spacing need about three hundred pixels vertically. We run this calculation before the contract and show in the proposal how many rows will actually fit.

• Check-in desk and boarding gate — P2.5, viewing from 2 m
• Waiting hall and gallery — P3 or P4, viewing from 3–4 m
• Timetable board — at least 25 pixels of character height
• Round-the-clock duty — LED life from 100,000 hours

Timetable, wayfinding and advertising on one canvas

The canvas is split into zones by the video processor: a window with the flight information system on the left, wayfinding and announcements on the right, a ticker at the bottom. The signal comes from an ordinary computer or media player — to it the screen is a monitor with an HDMI or DVI input, and no special protocol is required. The playlist switches by time of day: the morning departure wave, daytime advertising, a night mode at reduced brightness.

A terminal runs around the clock, so lifespan and remote management matter. Rated LED life is from 100,000 hours and the refresh rate is from 3,840 Hz, so security and broadcast cameras pick up no banding off the screen. Content and status of every screen in the terminal are visible from one workstation: the playback schedule, cabinet temperature and power, and the failure of an individual module. Changing a clip on ten screens takes minutes and needs no walk around the building.

Glazing, columns and the forecourt

Terminal halls are glazed and full of daylight. Such places call for models with headroom: 500×1000 mm cabinets at P2.6 and P2.9 give 1,000 cd/m², P1.95 gives from 900 cd/m², and automatic brightness control eases the screen into a soft mode by evening. Transparent mesh goes onto the glazing itself: at a 2.6 by 5.2 mm pitch it passes 70 per cent of light, weighs 7.5 kg per 1000×1000 mm cabinet and is 40 mm thick — the glazing stays glazing while the building works as a medium from outside.

Round terminal columns are clad in flexible 320×160 mm modules: they bend to a radius and hold on magnets, so the advertising is visible from any side of the flow. Outside, on the forecourt and above the drop-off, go 960×960 mm outdoor cabinets with 5,500–7,800 cd/m², IP68 protection and an operating range from minus forty to plus fifty degrees — a Kazakh winter and summer sun are normal duty for them.