Pixel pitch sets how close a viewer can stand before the image breaks into dots, how many LEDs every square metre carries, and what the screen costs. Choose it from the viewing distance, not from the spec sheet.
Pixel pitch is the centre-to-centre distance between two LEDs, measured in millimetres and written as the P number: P4 means four millimetres. It sets how close a viewer can stand before the image breaks into dots, how many LEDs every square metre carries, and therefore what the screen costs and how much power it draws. Outdoors, pick it from the viewing distance first, then check brightness, refresh and protection.
The number that sets the pitch is not the screen size. It is the distance to the nearest person who will look at it — the edge of the pavement, the near traffic lane, the first row of a stand. Not the far side of the road, where most of the audience happens to be.
Pixel density falls with the square of the pitch. Halve the pitch and you quadruple the LEDs per square metre: P8 uses four times fewer LEDs than P4 over the same area. That is why a coarse pitch is not a cheaper version of a fine one — it is the correct answer for a viewer twenty metres away, who cannot resolve the difference anyway.
We build P2.5 to P10 outdoors, each step for a specific throw:
The pitch also fixes the native resolution, and that number constrains your content. Resolution is width divided by pitch and height divided by pitch: a six by three metre screen is 1,500 × 750 pixels at P4, 1,000 × 500 at P6, and 750 × 375 at P8. Write that pair of numbers into the specification, because it is what the content team has to build to.
So produce the artwork at the screen's native pixel size, and look at the smallest text at 100 % zoom before you approve it. A layout drawn on a 1,920 × 1,080 canvas and squeezed onto a 750-pixel-wide screen loses exactly the details you wanted to show — a phone number, opening hours, a price. Text-heavy content on its own can justify one step finer in pitch, because the finer pitch is paid once and unreadable content is paid every day the screen runs.
Brightness. For a screen in direct daylight, the 6,000 to 6,500 nits class is what outdoor models are commonly specified at. Brightness is set in the control system, so the screen can be dimmed at night instead of running at full output around the clock.
Refresh rate. If the screen will be filmed, live-streamed or photographed — a stadium, a venue, a road with press coverage — specify 3,840 Hz as the floor, and 7,680 Hz where a broadcast camera gets close. Below that, phone cameras band and scan the image even though the eye sees nothing wrong.
Protection. Outdoor fixed cabinets are normally IP65: dust tight, and protected against water jets. The standard cabinet is 960 × 960 mm, built from 320 × 160 mm modules, with the joints between adjacent cabinets sealed with waterproof glue on site, because the joint is where moisture gets in. Coastal sites need the anti-salt version.
A pitch that is correct on the distance calculation can still fail for reasons that have nothing to do with resolution. The most common is a mixed-distance site: a rooftop screen with a public plaza beneath it, or a facade that people walk past at two metres on their way into the building. A pavement directly under the screen and traffic two lanes out are two audiences, and the near one sets the pitch — the far viewer loses nothing either way, while anyone standing underneath would see the LED grid as a pattern of dots.
The second is content that was never made for the screen: a 16:9 video stretched onto a 4:1 banner, or a photo upscaled until the edges go soft. The third is brightness uniformity across cabinets, which reads as a patchwork at dusk and is a calibration and binning question rather than a pitch question at all.
Five lines are enough to specify an outdoor screen properly, and they are the same five we ask for on every project.
The first two lines decide the pitch. The last three decide the specification around it — brightness, refresh and protection. Send those and the reply is a pitch, a cabinet count and a native resolution you can check against your own site, rather than a number you have to take on trust. If you already know the pitch you want, send the same five lines with it and we will confirm whether the site supports that choice before anything is quoted.