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Are We At the Limit of Screen Resolution Improvements?
itwbennett writes "A pair of decisions by Motorola and Ubuntu to settle for 'good enough' when it comes to screen resolution for the Ubuntu Edge and the Moto X raises the question: Have we reached the limit of resolution improvements that people with average vision can actually notice?" Phone vs. laptop vs. big wall-mounted monitor seems an important distinction; the 10-foot view really is different.
reading TFA...
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We're already past the level where I can benefit from higher resolution on phones. I'm over 40 and already have reading glasses, but I'd need to get special phone-only glasses to see any more detail or smaller type.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
We've reached this point with some devices, but a screen isn't a high enough resolution until Anti-Aliasing isn't needed in any form.
Come back and talk to me again when the average laptop and desktop screen hits high density PPI :)
I have rather poor vision, having to use different lens for reading, computer, distance...and I can still see the difference between 1080i and 4K monitors, a person with 20/20 should be able to benefit from even higher resolution (and I suspect even higher contrast ratios).
We know from testing a significant part of the female population would notice higher bit color space too.
If you build for the average person, you are doomed to fail. Because 1/2 of the population is above average. Also there are the finer details that a person doesn't fully recognize. The average person cannot tell the difference between 720p and 1080p. However if you have them side by side (with colors/contract/brightness matching) They will see the a difference.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
All of the PPI chasers trying to beat Apple on number specs are irrelevant. I guess on forums need numbers to argue superiority over but... personally when I no longer could see pixels under normal use I didn't care.
I remember someone did a test of this when Steve Jobs came out with "retina" claim. For a young child holding a phone at arm's distance 900 ppi was really "retina" resolution. I think we are likely one double short of retina resolutions on our higher resolution devices. 20 megapixel for a laptop, 5 megapixel for a phone is probably genuinely the limit.
Right now our hardware isn't fast enough to handle that much resolution so it is still a balancing act.
This will all be a silly prehistoric consideration a thousand years from now when those reading this is using atomic resolution.
Honestly, I think beyond a certain point the resolution increases are all hype. I have decent vision, and I was in BestBuy and looked at a retina iPad right next to a non-retina iPad. I literally could not tell the difference unless I stuck my nose up to the glass. It's all just marketing gimmick.
This was studied back in the beginning of the HD era. Most people cannot physically discern the difference between 720p and 1080p resolution on their TVs, viewed at normal distances. At the time I think they used 42" as the average panel size; that has probably increased somewhat, but the point stands.
Now we're putting 2 megapixels inside 5 inches? There was benefit to getting close to 300 ppi (i.e. "retina" resolution); that's basically National Geographic-level print resolution. But new phones that are pushing over 450 are wasting loads of battery life by pushing around way more pixels than are at all necessary.
Roughly 720p on a handheld is all that form factor will ever need, until we start engineering human eyes to work better. Tablets can go a bit higher, but anything more than the Nexus 10's resolution is a waste.
Seriously, I think we've even already passed the sweet spot, into useless (i.e. wasteful) overkill. I wish I could buy a lower-res (but otherwise the same) smartphone, and reap the difference as longer-lasting battery (and also increased performance, though I doubt I would be able to perceive that, outside of looking at tables full of benchmark times). I know it's subjective and we all have our different thresholds, but if we aren't there yet, then surely almost everyone would agree that we're at least close to being there, right?
Many technologies have already caught up with human physiology limits. The best example, I think, is audio: it's relatively trivial, given current mainstream CPU capability, storage size and bandwidth, and network bandwidth, to exceed the aural capabilities of most humans. 192kHz 24-bit audio, or DSD streams, exceed the hearing limits of most people, although there are still intangibles between that and traditional analog sources, that some people can, or think that they can, hear.
Video and stills are the next frontier. Many (MANY) people can't tell the difference between 480i and 1080p video on a typical TV at typical viewing distances. Why? If they have 20/20 vision, it's a brain thing.
1080p on, say, an iPad Mini Retina (not yet announced or shipping, of course) will exceed the resolving power of most people's eyes and brains at normal viewing distances. 1080p on a 10-foot home theater screen shows pixels for some people at normal viewing distances. 4K does not. But, if you've ever seen 8K, "something" makes it pop much more than 4K, and it's very close to looking through a window at something. The illusion is shattered if the POV changes at all, e.g. a camera pan. But, for a static camera, 8K is very convincing. So, while 1080p may be "good enough", 4K is a step function upwards for large-screen TVs and home theater projector applications, and 8K may approach the limits of human vision. We won't know until someone tries 16K and we see if there's an intangible difference.
Didn't laser printers show us that 300dpi is still a bit jaggy, and 600dpi is perfectly smooth at arm's length? When screen resolution is around 400dpi then we are probably done.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Until print serif fonts can be read without getting headaches: No.
how about sorting out readability in bright sunlight and battery life (without losing the gains in the other factors)?
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And 640k is more memory than anyone will ever need on a computer.
If you want to make high resolution true holograms, you'll need to square the pixel density (intuitively, each pixel has to contain an entire high resolution image which would correspond to the hologram as seen though a pinhole placed on this pixel).
Bring on the 1M PPI displays.
\u262D = \u5350
It's a matter of PPI and typical viewing distance. Phones are often held about a foot from your face. Computer monitors are usually two or three feet away from your face. TVs are significantly further away. Greater distance = eye is more tolerant of lower PPI. That's why the iPhone 5 is ~326 PPI, a Macbook Pro with Retina is ~220 PPI, an Apple 27" Thunderbolt Display is ~110 PPI and a 65" 1080p TV is ~35 PPI.
What I'm really waiting for is 100Hz screens without ghosting, and perhaps a yellow pixel element as well for higher color definition. The "60Hz" screens we have today are more like 16Hz screens.
Anyone who has seen 50 or 60Hz progressive TV, often seen in news casts and soap operas for some reason, know just how alive and vivid everything looks compared to the 24-25 or 30 FPS usually seen on TV, Internet and in movies.
Signature intentionally left blank.
What is the size of the smallest pixel that can currently be made using LCD technology?
For my phone, screen resolution is good enough(tm). Screen power consumption is in drastic need of improvement. It's consistently the biggest drain on the battery.
If we are getting 1080p on 5" phones you hold 10" from your eyes, I want similar resolution on my 30" desktop that I sit 20" from.
Maybe my math is wrong, but 2x distance should require 1/2 the pixel density. But 6x the size would be something around 6000x3000 on my desktop I think. I am happy with 2650x1600, but it could use 4x the pixels I guess.
I am happy with 52" 1080p in my den at 8' but 4k would be better...
I have been craving more pixels since I found I could make my 486 33 run some games in xga mode, getting 1024x768 amazing pixels.
Because 1/2 of the population is above average.
Half the population is above (or below) the median.
AVERAGES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOOD NIGHT!
I'm no mathematologist, but I think half of the population is above the median; not the average. :P
As a rift owner I can say for certain that at least for VR applications we will need much higher resolutions than we currently have in small form factors (and frankly I'd want this in larger factors as well).
I frankly think we need to get about 4k on a 5-7 inch screen before we start getting I can't visually tell the difference between real life in the VR context. So no we don't need it on phones but we will else where.
Have we reached the limit of resolution improvements that people with average vision can actually notice?
Hasn't really slowed the push toward 4K in video production. While it's sometimes handy to have the frame real estate in production, it takes up a crapton more space, requires more power to edit and it's mostly useless to consumers. Even theater projection systems can't resolve much over 2K.
But if the industry doesn't go to 4K, then who will buy new cameras, editing software and storage hardware? And consumers might never upgrade their "old" HDTVs. Think of the children!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I agree "at normal viewing distances" I don't have perfect vision, but when I want to see a detail, guess what I do? I zoom in, and move closer. This is where high resolution on those devices becomes important. Not at the standard "laboratory condition" distances, but when I want to inspect something closer.
Am I abnormal in this?
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Wikipedia says:
Angular resolution: about 4 arcminutes, or approximately 0.07Â
Field of view (FOV): simultaneous visual perception in an area of about 160Â Ã-- 175Â.
So that's about 2200 x 2400 if the screen is at the correct distance. Further away and you need less resolution. Closer and you won't see the whole image.
Because 1/2 of the population is above average..
Averages don't work that way.
Because 1/2 of the population is above average.
Basic stats fail.
Half the population is above the *median*, by definition.
Half the population is only above the average/mean for a given characteristic if that characteristic has a exactly symmetric distribution such as the normal distribution
Example:
IQs 89, 90, 91, 130
Average is 100, 3 below average and 1 above average.
Median is 90.5 (average of the two 'middle values'). 2 below median, 2 above.
You're assuming Normal distribution. If it is logarithmic distribution, which I'd put more money on, then you're wrong. Only a small number of people can see better than average, 20/20. Many see far worse, and some, like myself for a time, have vision like 20/15. It doesn't last, and "half" the population isn't any where near it.
Devices like the Oculus Rift need resolution to go way higher. I once calculated (perhaps completely incorrectly) that an 11K display was the threshold of "retina" for the Rift, although I'd imagine 8K would be close enough. This is a 5-7" display we're talking about here.
Higher resolution makes text easier to read as you focus in on small portions of a screen, the higher pixel density is crucial. Despite that, I would personally prefer engineers focus on making screens refresh faster (i..e higher framerates). I want everything that reaches my eye to be a minimum of 120fps, that includes 3D with 120fps per eye. 2nd to that I want more accurate detail in shadows. You tend to just get washed out or blacked out, complete lack of fine detail.
http://www.itcexperts.net/library/Capability%20of%20the%20human%20visual%20system.pdf
Everyone at my work over 40 can't see a damn thing so their 1920x1080 monitors are at 1280x800. That awful pixel shrink ratio results in blurry crap which is almost as difficult to read. If the resolution was 10x higher, it would be a lot less noticeable because larger resolution pixel blurs would be possible. So no, they should keep increasing it.
No, with a normal distribution, half the population is going to be above and the other half below, no matter what average you take. That's assuming a normal distribution. I don't know what distribution visual acuity of the industrialized world's population actually is. I'd hazard a guess that it's skewed to the lower end with the higher end quickly diminishing.
Now, instead of the mean or even the median, the average that best fits in this case is probably the mode.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Multiple screens can turn data into information when applied.
A large portion of the monitors on the market today have crappier resolution than monitors one the market 15 years ago. All these stupid 1080p monitors have pixel sizes in the 0.25 - 0.30mm range. My Sony Trinitron CRT was 0.22 back in 1997.
Basic stats fail.
I can't believe there are five posts on here that declare 'average' to be 'mean' and then go on to criticize the GP's lack of statistical knowledge.
I think the very first thing on the very first day of my first statistics class was a discussion of mean, median, and mode, and how all three are referred to as 'average' in common parlance, depending on context.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
have vision like 20/15. It doesn't last, and "half" the population isn't any where near it.
hrm, I've been contact-lens corrected to 20/15 for the past 28 years.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Wait, we're talking about digital movie projection, as in machines that will be used to show "Transformers 7: Incomprehensible Jump-Cut Explosiongasm!" and you're worried about it being commercial failure because too many people are above average?
(Oh god, when did I get so old?)
0 1 - just my two bits
Didn't laser printers show us that 300dpi is still a bit jaggy, and 600dpi is perfectly smooth at arm's length? When screen resolution is around 400dpi then we are probably done.
300dpi didn't cut it for dithered images - 600dpi was close, but not quite enough. The winner was the 1200dpi laser printers.
When you have a grayscale image you want to print on a single-color device, you use dithering to create the illusion of gray shades. A 1-to-1 mapping of pixels to printer dots gives you 2 colors - black and white. Photos look horrible. Double the printer resolution so you have a 2x2 dot array for each pixel and you have 16 possible shades. Double it again for a 4x4 dot array per pixel and you have 256 possible shades. So if you want a 300 pixel-per-inch gray scale image to look good, you need a printer resolution of 1200dpi.
Now, all this changes for RGB displays, since each pixel can be from 16 to 256 shades each. But less depth per pixel might be compensated for by smaller pixels and a higher density.
I remember in the early days of computer graphics, it was believed that 24-bit color (8-bit each Red, Green and Blue pixels) was the pinnacle. But once 24-bit color became widely available, we discovered it wasn't enough. When edited in Photoshop, often a 24-bit image would show banding in the sky, due to rounding errors in the math involved. Adobe added 48-bit color (16-bits per RGB channel) the rounding errors became much less visible. Today cameras capture 8, 12,14 or 16 bits per RGB channel, and using HDR software we get 96-bit color.
My point is we have a history of thinking we know where the limit is, but when the technology arrives, we discover we need a little bit more....
Place nail here >+
This is the MHz was all over again. After a certain point, 99% of users stop caring because it's "good enough."
I once ran a test on my Note 2 with different screen brightness and lighting conditions, with different people. I asked them to guess the screen resolution between (a) 720p and (b) 1080p, playing a movie in 720p (the actual screen resolution).
The ones who said they could tell the difference actually got it wrong, claiming it was 1080p.
Most just didn't care one way or the other.
Let the engineers leave the dpi race aside and work on more pressing matters, like creating cheaper screens that are not battery hogs, with correct color warmth and bigger than OLEDs.
Until we move to resolution independent GUIs and software I really don't care about insanely high res screens.
I have a friend that is a huge fan of a projector for his primary display. When you take even high end resolution and project it out to 12 feet across, there is no such thing as too much resolution.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
I mean, I'm not sure I'd ever have any reason to care personally about a laptop screen better than 1920x1200... but on the other hand, I can't actually *buy* a laptop screen with 1920x1200, so no, we clearly aren't, until I can (again).
1/2 of the population is above average? Since when an average is equal to a median?
What we should be/are concentrating on is better reflow and text to speech.
Ask me how I can tell you don't go out in crowds much.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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I once did the back-of-napkin calculations to make a scale-independent metric. Astronomers know that if you hold your fist at arm's length, your fist occludes roughly ten arc degrees in whatever direction you measure across your fist. My search found that someone's 20/20 eyes can generally resolve details to about 1 arc minute (didn't read Wikipedia's rationale). If that much screen area contains one megapixel or more, then the screen is well within the definition of a "Retina" display (at the given viewing range).
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Give me a 4k 20inch monitor and I'll be happy, but we don't have it yet.
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Ask me how I can tell you've never noticed how few people use earphones all the time.
Just keep refining that selection criteria until you reach one.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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So long as I still see rainbow-colored edges on all my text, the answer is no.
And don't give me that nonsense about out-of-calibration monitors.
I've got a 1080p projector for my HTPC. At ~100 inches diagonal, at a distance of ~14 feet I cannot discern individual pixels. I also do not wear or need glasses. If I sat closer it'd be an issue.
The other nice thing about having more pixels is how well lower-res source material plays. I once had an old 1024x768 projector, and N64 games looked absolutely awful on it.
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Even if we are, it's all about screen quality. I'd like to see huge 4k AMOLED TVs.
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No.
I don't know, when was the first version of Microsoft Office released?
It all depends on screen size and viewing distance. Here is my opinion.
Phone: Yes
Laptops: Getting closer
TV with 4k in typical living room: probably
Computer monitor: Hell no!
192kHz 24-bit audio, or DSD streams, exceed the hearing limits of most people
It exceeds the hearing limits of all people. Anyone saying otherwise is either an audiophool or the recording, mastering, or playback has been botched in someway that dramatically reduces the quality of the audio.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Right?
Moore's law has allows us to double display densities nearly as fast as CPU and memory had been improving.
The addition of a simple lenticular or image mask can turn any LCD in to a glasses free display.
An additional increase in resolution will then turn this in to a multiview display.
A bit more resolution and a micro lens array can then create a light field display.
Beyond that is digital holography.
It's all fairly cut and dry, standards are already falling in place to accommodate and stream this level of video and even capture live video like this.
So any software developer that assumes we've hit the limit will looks as foolish as Bill Gates saying no one would ever need more then 640k of memory.
http://videotechnology.blogspot.com/search?q=Lenticular
http://videotechnology.blogspot.com/search/label/3D
http://videotechnology.blogspot.com/search?q=Multiview
http://videotechnology.blogspot.com/search/label/Digital%20Holography
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
More like this, please. We had 22" monitors @ 200 dpi TEN FREAKING YEARS ago. I understand they were pricey at the time, but then again most technology is like that -- I don't understand why they didn't keep making them and wait for them to get cheaper. Apple introduced the multi-thousand-dollar 30" LCD around the same time and it stayed in production for years and the price dropped over 50% in that time. I'd pay $2-3,000 today for a 24-30", 200 dpi monitor. (Assuming it used standard connectors and I could use it for 5-10 years, as I tend to do with good monitors.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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Yes.
We're no remotely close to the maximum resolution we will need. If you want your entire living room wall be a TV, how many pixels would it be enough for you to have maximum crispiness? Probably in the 10's of thousands horizontal ones. What if you're using an HMD like the Oculus Rift, which covers your entire vision with a display? How much would be enough in order for it to as detailed as real life? We have a long way to go before we start talking about end of the resolution race. FYI. Most networks are planning the adoption of 8K transmitions by 2020.
Big improvements recently on consumer-grade retina displays but I still see the pixels on all of them. Text has jaggies and images have noticeable detail limitations. We sit / use devices way too close for the current state-of-the-art to be good enough.
Well personally im satisfied with 720p on a cellphone, going up to 1080 (or more) just doesnt give enough of an noticable improvement to justify the increased battery drain.
TFA is in response to this article ?
It realy exists lolllz.
But it's not even in America.
Once again, I learned something on Slashdot today.
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Actually, history has proven just the opposite... When you build for the average person, you maximize the selling potential of your product. That's why everything from ramen noodles to cars are designed for an "average" person. Moreover, in many situations you're required to design & build products to conform to some regulation designed for an average person. Not meeting those requirements immediately dooms your product to failure.
Sure there's some variability to what is considered average, depending on your country and/or market, and even level of technology, but the point being, that by not designing products for the average person, you're designing for a niche or specialty market, or experimenting with new or novel technology.
Obligatory car analogy: That's why there's a whole lot more people driving Toyota Corollas then there are driving Bugatti Veyrons - even though side by side, most people would probably notice a clear difference and prefer a Veyron. /Obligatory car analogy
Until that wall mounted display becomes easily confused with a window I'd say there's room for improvement.
Not just in resolution, but also in constrast, response, color, brightness.
But it's more complicated than that.
Is 4k good enough for a 2d huge television? Yes. Is 300+ PPI good enough for phones? Again, yes. For our standard 2d content we've had good enough for a while. In fact 1080p is good enough for smaller TV's such as 40" and the distance most people watch it from. And what is good enough? Good enough is the point where people have real trouble distinguishing between getting any higher in resolution, no matter how much higher it is.
But that doesn't mean we don't have uses for higher resolution screens. Glasses less 3D screens, vastly preferable, can require multiple times the resolution a human actually sees to function properly. VR displays like the Occulous Rift need around 16x the pixel density of screens we have now before we get to the same "good enough" resolution as we have on our phones.
There are also light field displays, capable of producing an image our eyes can actually focus on in varying content controlled depths. But these need much higher pixel densities than we currently have, because unlike conventional displays light field displays scatter photons in specific directions. We don't see a lot of the photons being produced unless we're focusing on the right depth. But the tradeoff is that we could, at some point in the future, use a lightfield display and 3D to make it appear as if we truly are just watching a window into another world. Walk into a movie theater to watch Star Wars 10 and staring at the screen, you may well see an image so perfect your brain has no idea it doesn't actually exist.
So do we have good enough screens? Yes. Do we need more pixel density anyway? Yes.
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For phones, sure, we are reasonably close at hitting diminishing returns. But when it comes to Google Glass, the Oculus Rift or augmented and virtual reality in general we are nowhere near at hitting it. It will probably take 20K screens 2 inch in size before we hit diminishing returns there. Nvidia also just demoed a few nifty light field displays that would need even more resolution then a classical 2D display, so that's out even further.
Also lets not forget about our good old monitors at home, 4K monitors are finally back on the market, but still far from having any kind of mass market penetration and when it comes to big curved monitors, you'd probably need 8K or 16K before you are done.
At $DAYJOB, we're always getting lots of company propaganda about "Don't Text While Driving". Not a problem for me - I can't do texting without my reading glasses, and I can't drive with my reading glasses on. And the [expletive-deleted] HTC-flavored Android texting application may look pretty, but it doesn't let me change the font size, and doesn't let me do the two-finger stretch thing, and doesn't even do a decent job of adapting to landscape-more screen orientation. Yes, the Google-provided keyboard thing with it has a little button you can press to do speech-to-text, if you've got your reading glasses on so you can not only press the [expletive-deleted] little button and then read the results it got back to be sure they're not hopelessly garbled, but that doesn't really help.
Yes, a higher resolution screen helps make the text clearer. But what I really want is a phone that can be controlled entirely by voice for most common applications, like texting. The Bluetooth connection to my car supports voice dialing; why can't the phone support at least voice-controlled reception of text messages?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Thank you. I thought i was going to have to post "The median is an average, as are the mean and mode." five times. :)
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
Because 1/2 of the population is above average.
Basic stats fail.
Half the population is above the *median*, by definition.
Half the population is only above the average/mean for a given characteristic if that characteristic has a exactly symmetric distribution such as the normal distribution
Example:
IQs 89, 90, 91, 130
Average is 100, 3 below average and 1 above average.
Median is 90.5 (average of the two 'middle values'). 2 below median, 2 above.
If you don't recognize the difference between the colloquial term "average" and the mathematical concept of "[arithmetic] mean", I think we can safely conclude that your IQ is below both.
Yeah, for a 24" monitor I'd be happy to have 300dpi, because I want to be able to read my computer as easily as I read paper. 200x200 is a standard-mode Group 3 Fax machine resolution, and while it's a lot less ugly than the 100x200 mode, it's still ugly (though of course your monitor doesn't have the vertical sloppiness that mechanically-driven paper printer rollers have and the fuzzy pixels of thermal paper.)
If you're watching movies, or even still pictures, resolution doesn't matter as much, because your eyes will fix that stuff. But when I'm using a computer monitor, I usually want to read lots of text. For that you need actual pixels, even if most of them are running in 1-bit color, or 4-bit color so you can do better navigation clues.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So what do you recommend for people who don't want black bars at the sides ("I wanna use all the inches I paid for"), don't want the score cut off on sport programs (ergo no "zoom"), and either don't want to pay an additional recurring fee for HD service on top of what they already pay for TV or don't want to relearn the numbers or order of channels?
Until we see a lot of 4K TVs out there, we aren't going to get cheap 4K PC monitors. As far as high enough quality for work goes, color resolution doesn't matter to me; pixel count and size do. (And as for responsiveness for gaming goes, as long as the screen isn't actually flickering, Nethack isn't bothered by 50ms latency.)
Having finally acquired an HDTV this year, I've found that it's nice to have a monitor that is in the same aspect ratio as movies so I don't need to black-box or have the sides cut off, but there aren't that many movies that really need the extra resolution as opposed to the correct aspect ratio. Regular TV programming cares even less about resolution; either the writing's good or it's not, and HDTV won't fix bad writing, and talking heads are either saying something sensible or blathering. Sports and nature programming are exceptions to that - being able to see a moving hockey puck or tennis ball better helps a lot, and wildlife pictures on National Geographic do look a lot better if you've got hi-def.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My first laser printer was an Imagen wet-process printer (based on the printer mechanism of a Canon copier engine.) 240dpi, with a liquid toner that was pretty much carbon black dissolved in kerosene. It didn't need anti-aliasing to smooth out jaggies :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My guess is the opposite - you'll probably notice the difference in resolution more for black on white text than for photos.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
20/20 may be normal, but is it it average, either mean, median, or mode?
I believe Excel 2007 uses AVERAGE for MEAN.
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I don't know if this is the case, but it may have something to do with translation. I always thought "average" was equal to "mean", because they both translate to the same word in portuguese, which has the meaning of "mean". Thanks for the clarifying post! :)
When people say "average", they usually mean "arithmetic mean", but medians and modes are also considered averages. The OP may have chosen an ambiguous word, but they weren't wrong.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
does it matter since its obviously not about scientific research and just about selling to homes, retail as they say, i sometimes suspect slashdot of being abused as an intricate way of advertising for the future because of its renown as a hive of ultrageeks.
does it matter for home use? or was it about scientific research and did i get it wrong
i just read the title
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
Even 48/16 *with proper noise shaping* would be enough as a transport format.
192/24 is nice for processing because you don't have to worry so much about headroom and accumulated noise. But then 192/float would do even better there.
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It's a CRT HDTV that he bought along with the house. He pays for a cable TV tier that happens to include HD service but doesn't use HD much himself. Instead, he leaves the TV set on stretch because he's used to stretch, or at least dislikes stretch less than he dislikes having to relearn the channel order.
but NOT for monitors.
Basically monitors stopped pushing density once the magic "Full HD" number was reached, and then few manufacturers bothered to do more than that. But considering you sit within 2 - 3 feet in front of a 24"+ monitor, higher densities would be beneficial. I say this after trying to make some tiny UI component look better at 16x16 resolution, with a higher DPI monitor I could put more clarity in to the same physical size that 16 pixel currently consume today.
But for phones, yes, even holding something a few inches from your face you are not going to see individual pixels, making text smaller or more UI refinement is not going to benefit from the engineering effort required to increase pixel density past 500 dpi. Also for TV's sitting back 8 - 10 ft the high pixel density isn't going to offer much in the way of the wow factor.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Even if they mean "arithmetic mean", mean is more often than not NOT the 50%-50% dividing point of the sample.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
In reality, you're probably better off building high end gear for people covered within 2-3 standard deviations of the mean.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Standard deviations go both ways; above & below the mean. "High end" on the other hand, is synonymous with "above average" - i.e. better than what most people use/need.
I'd say, IDEALLY it's better to build high end, but in reality we build according to requirements, financial constraints, time to market, return on investment, etc. Using the original topic as an example, you could build high end 4K Ultra High Definition monitors that would certainly work almost everyone. However, at this time, to make a profit you're probably going to have to sell your monitors at a price point that 2-3 standard deviations of the mean population can't afford.
No, the median is.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife