We talk to our product experts about calibrating LED video walls and how MicroTiles LED do it better
I had the opportunity to sit down with Mike Bernhardt, director of product management, and James Robinson, executive director of display engineering, to talk about calibrating LED video walls – specifically, what it is, why it matters, and how MicroTiles® LED does calibration better.
James discusses MicroTiles LED with rAVe at ISE 2025.
Q: Could you start by explaining what calibration is?
Mike Bernhardt (MB): Calibration is essential for optimizing LED displays. It's the process of fine-tuning every LED to normalize their unique brightness, color, and other characteristics so they blend seamlessly into a uniform display. While all LED displays benefit from this process, the quality of calibration can vary significantly.
MicroTiles LED are precision calibrated in our Kitchener, Canada, manufacturing facility.
James Robinson (JR): All LED displays require some level of calibration. The reason for this is manufacturing variability; each individual LED on an LED display will output a different amount of light compared to its neighbor if driven with the same current.
To correct this, the LED display goes through a calibration process. A camera is used to measure the light output versus a given current, which allows us to adjust the current being sent to each individual diode so they all can output the same amount of light and produce a uniform and balanced image.
A very common approach in the industry is for the manufacturer to stage the entire LED array in their factory and use a camera to capture the native brightness of each LED pixel. The camera then generates a calibration map that will be applied in the field once the display is installed.
Q: What are the limitations of this approach?
JR: Calibrating a wall this way means that when the wall is installed in the field, it has to be built identically to the way that it was staged and calibrated in the factory. The supplier needs to make careful note of exactly where each individual module board was placed during calibration and then label it based on its position within the video wall. For example, A1, A2, B1, B2.
When the video wall arrives at the installation location, you must put it back together in the order that it was calibrated and recall the calibration files that go with each panel. If you make any errors in terms of what you programmed or where you put a module board, the calibration of the wall falls apart, and your image is no longer uniform.
Additionally, if you break a module board during installation, it creates the challenge that all boards now need to be recalibrated on-site. There are a lot of headaches that come with this approach.
Q: How does calibrating MicroTiles LED differ from the standard approach you mentioned above?
JR: We include memory on each board to store the calibration values associated with that individual LED module. This means that the module board, or tiles, can be placed anywhere on the video wall—we don’t have to map out or maintain the precise placement of each tile.
The module boards “talk” to each other and to the system, to determine the calibration factors that should be applied based on the instructions stored in the on-board memory. The system is then able to ensure that the image is perfect across the entire wall. If a tile is damaged, it can be immediately replaced with a spare, and the video wall will “heal” itself, and the image will appear perfectly calibrated. It’s actually fun to walk up to a MicroTiles LED wall, remove a module board, and hot swap in a new one. You will see the system realize a new module was installed – it will interrogate the new module and the rest of the array and apply a new calibration to make the new tile “disappear” into the array perfectly, all within about 10 seconds. It’s quite magical!
Q: We’ve talked about optical calibration in the previous question, but what about mechanical calibration?
JR: We designed MicroTiles LED to be highly precision-engineered, so you can take any tile and place it anywhere within the array, and it will fit perfectly and precisely. In contrast, in many video walls, if you need to swap out a module board, you have to adjust it and shim out the X, Y, and Z axes to ensure everything remains flat and that the seams between module boards are uniform.
MB: If you've ever laid a tile floor, you know that as soon as your measurements are off by a millimeter, the misalignment cascades and increases until you have to take it apart and start over again. It’s the same with video walls. If one module board is off by a minuscule amount, it can result in boards not fitting further into the installation of the wall. When that happens, you sometimes need to take it apart and start the installation again, or in extreme cases, installers have to file the module boards to fit them together.
MicroTiles LED is unique in that it “soaks up” all of the tolerances with a highly precise design and manufacturing process and a very precise mounting sheet that holds the tiles.
Q: What’s the benefit of calibrating a wall in this way?
MB: The efficiencies you gain are far easier installation, ongoing maintenance, and repair because you don't have to recalibrate the display—every tile has been individually calibrated through Christie's unique, innovative manufacturing process.
JR: We're delivering exceptionally high display quality and also making it easy at the same time, in terms of the assembly and installation.
Q: What are the benefits to our customers?
JR: Christie’s display customers are always looking to achieve and maintain exceptional display performance in their applications. This means that we need to faithfully reproduce their content as they created and reviewed it in their content creation environments: with excellent brightness, contrast, color gamut, greyscale depth, and accuracy.
Their tolerance for a poorly performing display is extremely low, and the required uptime of the video wall is extremely high. This is where MicroTiles LED is the ideal fit. If a pixel gets broken for any reason, the tile can be easily removed (using a ‘demodulator tool’), and a spare tile can be put in its place. The process takes a matter of minutes, and no recalibration or fine adjustment process is needed. It just works.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
MB: We engineered and calibrated MicroTiles LED arrays precisely to ensure that your content looks exactly as intended. With MicroTiles LED, you get exceptional display quality in a technology that’s faster and easier to install and maintain than a typical LED video wall.
