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.

Comments

I have a hard time

[vikingpower]

reading TFA...

already passing it

[tverbeek]

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.

Not until Anti-Aliasing isn't a thing

[earlzdotnet]

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.

Re:Not until Anti-Aliasing isn't a thing

[Seumas]

I'm really excited for 4k monitors, but it's going to be awhile before really high quality ones that are great for work (color accuracy and reproduction, no weird problems exhausting your eyes like a lot of gaming-specific monitors) as well as great for gaming (responsive, negligible lag/input-delay/ghosting) are available. Even longer before they are around $3,0000 (which is about the price at which I'd pull the trigger on at least one of them).

Hopefully, by the time those exist, GPUs will exist that can fully utilize a 4k display on a single GPU.

As for home theaters? I don't think we'll see much 4k content in a very long time. I bought my first 50" 1080p HDTV in 2001 but it seems like most of the population is only now finally moving to HDTV in 2013 (and most of those are still the people who say things like "I don't know why we need HDTV -- standard television is as good as it needs to get and I can't tell any different!". There will be a huge chicken and egg problem for the next decade. Plus, since most of the content will start to be delivered over the network, there will have to be significant improvements in speeds and data caps in this country. We can't even count on true 1080p digital distribution, yet.

Consoles will not make use of 4k this generation, so that is out of the question for the next decade, too. Yeah, the PS4 and XBOX ONE both support 4k, but I doubt that's going to be true 4k. It'll be upscaled. I just don't see how these dinky little consoles with only a few gigs of memory available will be able to push enough bits around for native 4k.

Re:Not until Anti-Aliasing isn't a thing

[gl4ss]

can't seem to edit my previous post. antialiasing has nothing to do with resolution.

antialiasing and font edge smoothing as it is understood when people speak of antialiasing has pretty much everything to do with resolution.

if you can't see the individual pixels, and need say a group of 10x10 pixels to see a point on the screen, it becomes meaningless to do any subpixel effects of any kind on those 100 pixels that make up the smallest unit you can actually see.

and slashdot doesn't have an edit functionality btw.

Re:Not until Anti-Aliasing isn't a thing

[Chris Mattern]

A sharp edge contains infinitely high frequencies, so even a very high resolution display will produce aliasing,

But once it's aliasing invisible to the human eye, anti-aliasing becomes pointless.

No

[wangmaster]

Come back and talk to me again when the average laptop and desktop screen hits high density PPI :)

Re:No

[wangmaster]

The average smartphone has a 720p screen with a pixel density well above 200 now. In the context of this discussion, why can't an average panel that is generally within 12-24"s of your face (desktop or laptop) not have the same requirements?

Sure, there exists laptops today that do. But those laptops don't provide you with alot of choice (both are walled gardens, yeah yeah yeah, I know you can install other things on them etc etc etc, but that's not the point here).

That said, I know this is coming. We're seeing more and more high resolution ultrabooks/laptops. So when I say come back and talk to me again, it's very likely by the end of the year :).

Re:No

[Andrio]

Phones? Yes (There's not much benefit going past 1280 * 800 )

Tablets? Getting there (Nexus 7 at 1080p, Nexus 10 at 2560 * 1600)

Monitors? NO! Let me put it like this. Most monitors sit somewhere between the previously mentioned phone and tablet resolutions, despite being 2-5 times the size.

Digital Movie Projection... and "Average People"

[jellomizer]

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.

seems like...

[buddyglass]

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.

Re:900 dpi

[Trepidity]

It's a bit complex, because the retina doesn't really have a static resolution: it integrates information from constant movements, responses nonlinearly to different patterns of photon impacts, and has different sensitivies across different parts. You could put a ballpark number on it, but it's difficult to really sort out what the "resolution of the retina" is.

To quote a paper:

Many would say that new display technologies, 9 megapixel panels and projectors for example, are coming ever closer to “matching the resolution of the human eye”, but how does one measure this, and in what areas are current displays and rendering techniques still lacking? [...] The resolution perceived by the eye involves both spatial and temporal derivatives of the scene; even if the image is not moving, the eye is (“drifts”), but previous attempts to characterize the resolution requirements of the human eye generally have not taken this into account. Thus our photon model explicitly simulates the image effects of drifts via motion blur techniques; we believe that this effect when combined with the spatial derivatives of receptive fields is a necessary component of building a deep quantitative model of the eye’s ability to perceive resolution in display devices.

Pretty interesting stuff, from a project that tried to build a photon-accurate model of the human eye.

Re:Digital Movie Projection... and "Average People

[Anonymous Coward]

Because 1/2 of the population is above average.

Half the population is above (or below) the median.

Hasn't stopped manufacturers

[HangingChad]

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!

Human eye

[the eric conspiracy]

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.

Re:Digital Movie Projection... and "Average People

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Printers and resolution

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

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....

Projectors need as much resolution as you have wal

[Quantus347]

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.

Dead Ends

[SuperKendall]

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.

3D and beyond

[John Sokol]

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