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

[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

[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.

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.

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....