Shenzhen Ops Center Gets 121-Foot Wide Fine Pitch Monitoring Wall

June 1, 2018 by Dave Haynes

It hasn’t really happened in North America or, likely, EMEA, but in China, fine pitch LED is increasingly supplanting projection tiles, edge-blended projection and narrow bezels LCDs as the tech of choice for big control room environments.

If the room is big enough and operators are set back enough, the clarity is there for MASSIVE walls of dashboard information and video feeds.

This is the Longgang Operation Centre (LOC) in Shenzhen, which is there to do … something. Not sure. The press release says Smart Cities. Longgang is part of the endless mega-city that radiates out from the China side of the border, immediately north of Hong Kong.

The LED board has 798 of Absen’s 1.2mm pitch modules, and is set on a gentle radius, like a giant curved monitor. It is 37.1 meters wide (121 feet for the metric-impaired) and has 103 million pixels. The control set-up takes 181 feeds and displays 105 windows at 720p, 40 at 1080p and 10 at 4K..

“To engineer such an enormous curved screen of high resolution in 85 days from production to installation is a big challenge,” says Absen sales director Zhang Yongfeng. “The center was still being built and full of dust during installation process. Thanks to our sophisticated technologies and highly-effective teams, it was really a tough task, but we made it!”

This would have cost a coupla bucks, at least $1.6 million just for the modules. If it was up in a sports book in Nevada, probably $3 million-plus. Prices change, but my understanding is 1.2mm is $20K plus a square meter on this side of the Pacific.

Looks amazing, and at 1.2mm pitch, even the crisp lines of schematics would look OK from 10 feet back at an operator desk.