Video Wall
Installation on
Long Island

The island facts we plan around

• The biggest employers are suburban campuses. Northwell Health, based in Lake Success and New Hyde Park, describes itself as New York State’s largest private employer with more than 104,000 employees, spread across hospitals and outpatient sites in both counties rather than one tower.
• One industrial park holds one job in twenty. The Regional Plan Association counts about 1,300 companies and more than 55,000 employees in the Hauppauge Industrial Park, just over two square miles that account for roughly one in twenty Long Island jobs.
• Walls already run the island’s public-safety work. The Suffolk Crime Analysis Center at police headquarters in Yaphank uses a video wall to display footage from countywide cameras, as part of the state’s network of crime analysis centers.
• Campuses build them on modest budgets. Stony Brook University put a 6′6″ × 12′ video wall in the Frey Hall lobby over a winter break, reporting a budget under $40,000 with its own electricians, carpenters and painters doing the physical work.
• Newsrooms and offices use several sizes at once. Newsday’s Melville headquarters was fitted with a Planar 3×5 wall in the newsroom, an 8×10 wall in its auditorium and a 2×2 in reception, according to the furniture and AV firm that did the fit-out.
• One utility, a lot of meters. PSEG Long Island serves more than 1.2 million customers across the island and the Rockaways, so storm restoration is something every wall here has to ride through.

Many island businesses that ask about a wall are also rewiring the room around it. Our Long Island structured cabling crews run the data and video lines to it, the island TV installation team handles single screens in the rooms next door, and most showrooms pair a new wall with commercial cameras across the sales floor so the wall can show them. This page stays on the wall itself.

How the method changes from one building to the next

In an office-park building we open a small inspection hole or use the drawings to find the studs, their gauge and their spacing, then decide whether the mount can bolt through to blocking or whether we add plywood or steel backing inside the wall. A 55-inch commercial LCD panel weighs around 19 kilograms on its own, and a 3×3 array of them, before the mount, is well over 170 kilograms spread across one patch of wall. Light-gauge studs framed for drywall and a whiteboard are not automatically ready for that, and the answer is not to guess.

In a showroom we start at the front door and the windows. We stand where a customer walks in, at the time of day the sun is worst, and decide how bright the panels need to be and whether the wall should face away from the glass. A 500-nit LCD that looks perfect at night can lose its colour against a sunlit window; brighter panels exist, cost more and draw more power, and sometimes the better answer is to move the wall eight feet.

In a flex or industrial building the wall is usually block, which carries weight well but needs the right anchors and a cable route that does not leave conduit running across a painted surface. We check for dust and temperature, because commercial panels have operating limits — LG lists 0 to 40 °C and 10 to 80 percent humidity for its 55VM5J — and an unheated loading area or a plant floor may sit outside them for part of the year.

In storefronts, campuses and hospitals the rules of the building come first: shared walls need the neighbour or landlord to agree, public corridors need the wall to stay within the ADA protrusion limit, and institutional owners usually want drawings and cut sheets before work starts. In homes we look for joists and studs, a path for cables to the equipment, and an outlet that does not hang off a shared circuit with the freezer.

Picking the Display

Our reception area is only about 12 feet deep — will the lines between LCD panels bother people standing that close?

At 12 feet, people will see the seams on any LCD wall; the question is whether they will notice them. Samsung’s narrowest video wall panels quote 0.88 millimetres bezel-to-bezel, and its more common models 1.74 or 3.5 millimetres. Samsung also notes that the dark gap between the lit areas is a little wider than the bezel figure: its VM55B-E panel lists 1.74 millimetres bezel-to-bezel but 2.49 millimetres from active area to active area. On a logo, a video or a dashboard, a 2.5-millimetre line at 12 feet reads as a thin grid and most people stop seeing it within a week. On a spreadsheet or a line of small text that crosses a seam, it can cut a word in half.

So in a shallow reception we design the content to the grid, keeping text inside single panels, or we move to direct-view LED, which has no seams at all. For LED, the pitch has to suit the distance: Planar’s own table puts the average comfortable viewing distance for a 1.5-millimetre wall at 8 feet 6 inches, which is why fine-pitch LED is the usual answer for a reception that deep. It costs more, and we will show you both on paper before you choose.

Is a 2×2 of commercial panels really better than one 98-inch display?

Not always. A single large display has no seams, one input, one power cord and one thing to fail, and for a conference room where the content is a video call or a presentation it is usually the better buy. A 2×2 array of 55-inch panels is roughly a 110-inch picture with a cross through it; it wins when you need more size than single displays offer at your budget, when you want four separate sources at once, or when the wall will grow later.

We ask what the wall will show most of the day. If the answer is one full-screen thing, we often recommend the single display and save you the money. If it is several things at once, or a size a single screen cannot reach without moving into LED, the array makes sense. Either way you get the comparison in writing.

Our only way in is a standard door and a stairway — does that rule out a big wall?

Rarely. A wall is built from pieces, and the pieces are what has to get in. A 55-inch commercial panel ships in a carton roughly 1.4 metres long and weighs under 30 kilograms packed, which two people carry up most stairs. LED cabinets are smaller still and assemble into any size on site. What a narrow route does rule out is a factory-built all-in-one LED screen or a single huge display, which arrive as one large crate.

Before ordering we measure the route — doors, turns on the stair, the elevator if there is one, the ceiling height where the wall goes — and pick the product to fit. On older downtown buildings with a tight stair, that measurement has more than once decided between LCD and LED.

The Wall Behind It

Our offices are metal studs and drywall — what has to happen before a video wall mount goes up?

We find out what the studs are and what is between them. Light-gauge steel studs at 16 or 24 inches carry drywall and shelves well, but an array of panels hangs its whole weight off a narrow band of wall and pulls outward when a panel is popped out for service. The usual fix is backing: plywood or steel strapping fastened across several studs inside the wall, so the mount bolts into something continuous. In an occupied office we do that through a slot that is patched and painted afterwards, or from the back if the other side is a closet.

If the partition is not tied to the deck above, or is too thin, the alternative is a floor-supported frame that stands just in front of the wall and carries the panels itself. Either way the decision is made before the panels are ordered, and you know whether a painter or a patch is part of the job.

Can the wall go on a partition we share with the tenant next door?

Sometimes, with care and permission. A demising wall between two tenants is usually the landlord’s, often has fire-rated construction, and has a neighbour on the other side who will hear drilling and feel any through-bolts. We need the landlord’s written consent, we avoid penetrating a rated assembly without the right firestopping, and we do not run fasteners through to the other side.

When a shared wall is the only wall that works, a floor-supported frame or backing fixed only on your side usually solves it. When the shared wall is also thin and noisy, we may suggest a different wall, because panels with fans and a processor humming on a party wall are a complaint waiting to happen.

How far will the finished wall stick out into a corridor, and why does that matter?

It matters because of people who use a cane to find their way. The 2010 ADA Standards limit wall-mounted objects whose bottom edge sits between 27 and 80 inches above the floor to 4 inches of projection into a circulation path. A video wall panel is about 70 millimetres deep before the mount, and a pop-out mount adds more: Chief’s ConnexSys landscape mount can be set between 4 and 7.4 inches from the wall. In a lobby where the wall is set back from where people walk, that is fine. In a corridor or a narrow waiting room, a wall whose lower edge is below 80 inches can easily exceed the limit.

The answers are to recess the wall, raise its bottom edge, set the mount at its shallowest depth, or put a detectable element below it, such as a low ledge or planter within cane range. We draw the depth on the plan so you and your architect can see it.

Power, Heat and Permits

Who is allowed to wire the outlets behind the wall — and is it different in Suffolk and in a Nassau town?

A licensed electrician does the line-voltage work in both counties; what differs is who licenses them. Suffolk County’s rules reserve direct line-voltage and branch-circuit connections to the holder of a Suffolk County master electrician’s license, and separately describe a restricted license for cabling under 90 volts for networking, cable TV, fibre, audio, video and home theatre. In Nassau, electricians are licensed by the town: Hempstead, North Hempstead and Oyster Bay each keep an examining board, and an electrician licensed in one is not automatically licensed in another.

We hold the NYS low-voltage license (#12000287431) and do the low-voltage side: mounts, panels, video, data and control. We give your electrician a one-page sheet with the outlet positions, the load, and whether the processor needs its own circuit, and we do not hang panels until the outlets are in. If you have no electrician, we can introduce you to one licensed for your town.

Does the room need extra cooling once the wall and its processor are running?

In a small room, often yes. Nearly every watt a wall draws ends up as heat. LG lists its 55-inch 55VM5J video wall panel at 546 BTU per hour typical and 648 at maximum, so a 3×3 of them gives off roughly 4,900 BTU per hour in normal use, about what a small window air conditioner is built to remove. LG’s 136-inch all-in-one LED screen lists 2,218 BTU per hour on average and 4,436 at maximum. Add a processor and a media player and a closed conference room warms noticeably by afternoon.

We give you the heat figure for your exact wall so your HVAC contractor can check the room. In open lobbies it rarely matters. In a small boardroom, a converted office or a closet holding the processor rack, it can mean a dedicated return, a thermostat move or a ventilated cabinet.

If the wall faces the street through our window, does the town treat it as a sign?

It can. Town sign codes are written about what the public sees, not where the screen is mounted. Islip, for example, treats electronic message centers as a sign type with conditions for the life of the sign: each message held at least 45 seconds, no animation beyond the transition, transitions under a second, and night brightness kept under 0.3 foot-candles above ambient at 60 feet, enforced with an automatic dimming photocell. The permit also calls for an inspection and electrical certificate.

Other towns and villages write their own rules. Before we aim a wall at a window we check the code for your address, and if it is a sign we either set the content and dimming to comply and help with the permit, or turn the wall so it faces the room instead.

Driving the Picture

Do we need a separate computer to drive the wall, or can the panels handle it themselves?

For one picture stretched across the wall, the panels can often do it themselves. Many commercial video wall panels have a built-in tiling mode and a daisy-chain output: Samsung lists video wall daisy chaining up to 10×10 on its VMB series, and LG lists tile mode up to 15×15 on the 55VM5J. One source goes into the first panel, passes along the chain, and each panel shows its share.

You need a processor when you want several sources in different windows, layouts that change through the day, or a picture larger than the panels’ own scaling handles well. A processor is a dedicated computer, usually rack-mounted, with one output per panel. It costs more and adds a box to maintain, so we only specify one when the content calls for it.

Can one wall show the cameras, a news channel and a sales dashboard at the same time?

Yes, with a processor or a multiviewer in front of the wall. This is the most common request from operations rooms and showroom managers on the island, and it is exactly how public-safety and campus walls work: the Suffolk Crime Analysis Center in Yaphank uses its wall to display countywide camera footage, and Stony Brook’s campus monitoring room was reported running a 3×2 wall of 55-inch NEC displays with visualisation software.

The practical limits are inputs and network. Each source needs a path to the processor — HDMI over a short run, HDBaseT or network streaming over a longer one — and camera feeds need the recorder or video management system to allow them out. We map every source before quoting so the wall does not arrive with nowhere to plug in the news.

How do we stop a logo or a ticker from leaving a ghost on the panels?

Keep static elements moving or changing. LCD panels can hold a faint image of something left in one place for many hours, and the risk rises with brightness and heat. Manufacturers build in countermeasures such as pixel shift, which moves the picture by a few pixels from time to time, and screen-refresh routines that run when the wall is idle.

On the content side, we avoid a fixed logo in one corner all day, rotate dashboards with a slow shift, and schedule the wall to sleep after closing. If a ghost appears anyway, running moving content for a few hours usually clears it; if it does not, that is a warranty conversation with the panel maker, and our handover sheet has the serial numbers ready.

Distance and Support

What can you check from Brooklyn before anyone drives out east?

More than most owners expect, if the wall was set up for it. Commercial panels such as LG’s 55VM5J support network monitoring (SNMP), status emails and a “no signal” fallback image; processors and media players usually have a web page or remote management. With your IT person’s agreement, we connect those to a monitoring path at install so a panel that overheats, loses its input or drops off the network can raise an alert.

When you call, we can then see which panel is complaining, what it is receiving and whether the processor is running, and either fix it remotely or send a technician with the right part. For a wall in Riverhead or Yaphank that can be the difference between one trip and two.

Our building loses power in storms — what protects the wall when service comes back?

Surge protection and a sensible restart order. When power returns after a storm, it can come back with spikes and may drop again in the first minutes. We put the panels and processor behind proper surge protection, put the processor and network switch on a small battery unit so they ride through flickers, and set the panels to come on in a known state rather than whatever input they last saw.

We also save the wall’s full configuration — tile map, IDs, colour settings, processor layouts — so if a long outage does scramble anything, it is restored in minutes rather than rebuilt by eye. It is worth asking your electrician whether the circuit is on any load-shedding or generator scheme, because a wall that bounces on and off a generator transfer is a wall that loses settings.

Owning the Wall

Can we use the TVs we already bought?

You can, but think twice for anything that runs all day. Samsung’s own business guidance says consumer TVs are designed for perhaps eight hours a day, that turning them to portrait can make them fail because their cooling is not designed for it, and that a consumer TV’s warranty is invalidated if it is used commercially. Their bezels are also much wider, and two TVs of the same model bought months apart often do not match in colour.

For a home game room or a bar that runs the TVs a few hours a night as separate screens, reusing them is reasonable, and we can mount and align them well. For a lobby, an operations room or anything meant to look like one picture, commercial video wall panels are cheaper over their life, and we will show you the difference before you decide.

Who keeps the passwords, content files and drawings when the job is done?

You do. Everything is handed over in writing: admin passwords for the panels, processor and player; the network addresses; the tile and ID map; the saved configuration file; the as-built drawing with mount and backing positions; the electrician’s circuit numbers; and any content we made or loaded. We keep a copy only if you ask us to support the wall.

This matters most on the island, where the person who bought the wall often moves on before the wall does. A new office manager with the handover sheet can call any competent installer, including us, and be back in business quickly.

“A video wall costs about $500 to $2,500 per square foot”

Per-square-foot figures are the most quoted numbers online. One LED wall guide says most installed walls run about $500 to $2,500 per square foot; another breaks it down by pitch and puts fine-pitch LED at $1,500 to $2,500. Those figures describe direct-view LED only, and they say nothing about LCD tile walls, which are priced per panel and often cost far less for the same area.

They also average away the island-specific costs that decide a real quote: whether the partition needs backing, whether the electrician has to bring a new circuit from a panel at the far end of a flex building, whether a sign permit is needed, and how far the van drives. Two walls of the same size in Lake Success and in Riverhead can differ in total cost for reasons that have nothing to do with the screen.

Use per-square-foot numbers to sanity-check an LED quote, not to budget. Our pricing section below gives island ranges for complete LCD and LED configurations, in two columns for Nassau and Suffolk, and every quote lists the wall, the mount, the processor and the labour separately.

“You can buy a complete LED wall online for about $11,000”

You can buy the cabinets for that. One guide that lists those kits is candid that a 10×5-foot P2.9 package at roughly $11,000 to $15,000 is hardware only: event-grade cabinets, a basic sending card and a simple frame. Structural work, power circuits, installation and calibration are not in the box.

On the island, those missing items are exactly where the risk is. A kit frame designed to stand on a stage floor is not a wall mount, a sending card is not a multi-window processor, and cabinets bought without spare modules from the same batch are hard to match two years later.

We will install equipment you bought, and sometimes a kit is the right answer for a bar or a church on a tight budget. We just quote the structure, power coordination, calibration and spares honestly so you can compare the real totals.

“Pick pixel pitch with the ten-times rule”

Planar’s rule is pixel pitch times ten equals the approximate viewing distance in feet. Christie says allow about one metre of minimum viewing distance per millimetre of pitch, which is about 3.3 feet. Barco divides the optimal viewing distance in metres by two. Those three rules give quite different answers for the same room, and summaries usually quote one of them as if it were the only one.

They differ because they answer different questions: the closest anyone should stand, the distance where pixels disappear, and the distance that looks best. In an island showroom the nearest viewer may be a customer at the sales desk ten feet away while most people see the wall from the door forty feet back.

We measure the actual distances in your room — nearest seat, typical position, the door — and show you which pitches meet each one on Planar’s published table, then let budget decide between them.

“Thin-bezel LCD walls are seamless”

Marketing copy uses “seamless” loosely. Samsung’s narrowest panels quote a 0.88-millimetre bezel-to-bezel figure, and its own datasheet adds that the gap between active areas “may vary depending on the model and actual installation environment.” On one model the bezel figure is 1.74 millimetres and the active-area gap 2.49.

That is impressively thin, and from across a showroom it disappears. From a reception desk or a conference table it does not, and text that crosses a seam is harder to read. Alignment matters too: a mount that lets one panel sit a millimetre proud of its neighbour makes the seam catch the light.

If you need truly seamless, the answer is LED. If you choose LCD, we design content to the grid and align every panel with the mount’s micro-adjustments before handover.

“Any handyman who mounts TVs can hang a video wall”

Forum advice on the island tends to treat screens as a DIY job; a Long Island Reddit thread on TV mounting recommends a $40 kit, a stud finder and a drill. For one TV in a living room, that is fair advice.

A video wall is different in three ways. The weight is concentrated and pulls outward when panels pop out, so the wall needs checking or backing. The panels must align within a millimetre or so to look like one picture. And in a business, the outlets behind it are line-voltage work for a licensed electrician, while a wall facing a corridor has to respect the ADA 4-inch limit.

A handyman may do fine work on single screens. For a wall, ask who will check the partition, who will provide the circuit, and who will calibrate the panels, and get those answers in writing.

“Video walls are for arenas and big corporations”

The island’s best-known displays are huge: UBS Arena at Belmont Park installed 45 LED displays, with a centre-hung of 12 displays totalling 4,730 square feet. That is the image many people have of a video wall, and it makes a small business assume it is out of reach.

Most island walls are far smaller. Newsday’s Melville reception uses a 2×2, Stony Brook’s Frey Hall lobby wall is 6′6″ by 12′ and was reported at under $40,000 with in-house trades, and a Riverhead grill promotes a 21-foot wall for local fundraisers.

A 2×2 of 55-inch commercial panels is a realistic project for a dealership, a medical office or a bar. The pricing below starts there.

“Once it is installed, a video wall looks after itself”

The panels are built for continuous use, and that is often read as maintenance-free. Integrator forums are full of the opposite: panels drifting to different colours, a wall that needs a configuration file flashed back after a fault, and owners hunting for a replacement for a discontinued model.

Walls drift because panels age at slightly different rates, because one gets replaced, or because someone presses the wrong button on the remote. Settings get lost after power events. Fans and filters gather dust, especially in flex buildings.

An island wall should have a saved configuration, a spare, remote monitoring where the panels support it, and a yearly check. The maintenance contract rates are in the pricing table so you can decide whether you want us or your own staff to do it.

We also serve Great Neck, Manhasset, Port Washington, Mineola, Garden City, Westbury, Hicksville, Syosset, Massapequa, Freeport, Valley Stream, Huntington, Commack, Smithtown, Islandia, Bohemia, Ronkonkoma, Bay Shore, Patchogue, Medford, Port Jefferson, Riverhead and the forks, with the same licensed crews and the same written handover.

Already bought the equipment? Labour-only installation

If you bought panels, an LED kit or a processor yourself, we can install it. Because supplied equipment varies so much, labour-only work is quoted after the survey rather than from a table; repairs and adjustments to supplied walls are at the $195 an hour service rate with a three-hour minimum. We check the model numbers first so you know whether the panels will tile, whether the mount suits them, and whether anything is missing before we arrive.