Did they maybe not measure how many pixels we can see.. but rather how laughably bad COTS IPS are at contrast, as the examined pattern approaches their resolution? I wonder what happens if you repeat that with a reasonably bright 16K OLED.
Going from 1080p to 1440p feels like a huge improvement. Going from 1440p to 4k (aka 2160p) is a little bit sharper. I don't think the jump from 4k to 8k will improve things that much.
At "laptop" screen distances the difference between my Retina display and non-retina external monitors is quite noticeable; so much so that I run 4k in 1080p mode more and more.
8k is going to require those curved monitors because you'll have to be that close to it to get the advantage.
It depends on the distance really.
Text at a desktop at an arms distance max, possibly on 24"+ will be noticeably better.
I have a 34" inches ultra wide 1440p and I definitely would love higher pixel density.
But start getting 24" or less and 1440p vs 4k are borderline marketing.
People do swear to be able to see the difference, yet I remember they random tested some 120+ gamers who were shown the same TV with different output res, and the distribution of guesses had a very minor slight advantage for the 4k, well in the realm of errors, and it obviously dropped to non existence with just few centimeters of distance more.
Looks like good anti-aliasing for text to look better on lower DPI display is slowly getting the bitrot treatment...
fainpul•6d ago
For example:
- 40 cm view distance (e.g. smartphone): 300 ppi is roughly the maximum that's useful
- 100 cm (e.g. desktop monitor): about 200 ppi
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64679-2/figures/2
cubefox•4h ago
samat•3h ago
cubefox•2h ago
bombcar•52m ago
Size increases, animation decreases (when your iPhone is getting old, turn off animation and behold it operating super fast!), etc can all be found there.
I zoom websites until they "feel right" which is usually something close to "they are as wide as the window I have them in" - HN is a few taps up from "actual size".
trenchpilgrim•3h ago
dev_hugepages•2h ago
noosphr•2h ago
Put another way look at 300ppi prints and 1200ppi prints. The difference is night and day at 30 cm viewing.
ncruces•1h ago
You don't need 1200ppi for a nice 1200dpi print; even 300ppi may be enough.
adrian_b•17m ago
On the other hand, for printing text, an 1200 dpi printer has the quality of an 1200 ppi printer.
Many well-designed traditional typefaces have relied on optical effects caused by details that require for being printed a resolution higher than that at which the human eye can distinguish a set of bars from an uniform background (which is the object of TFA). For instance, in some typefaces the edges of the strokes are concave or convex, not straight, which could be rendered in a computer display only by either a much higher resolution or by more sophisticated pixel preprocessing methods (in order to simulate the effect on the eye). Whenever such typefaces are displayed at a lower resolution, i.e. on computer monitors, they are very noticeably uglier than when printed on paper by traditional metal printing methods or even by a high-resolution laser printer.
jl6•2h ago
adrian_b•44m ago
A 27" monitor has a height around 17", i.e. about 43 cm, and for watching a movie or anything else where you look at the screen as a whole the recommended viewing distance is twice the screen height, i.e. about 86 cm.
At this distance, the resolution needed to match the human vision is provided by a height of slightly less than 3000 pixels by this study, but by about 3300 pixels by older studies. In these conditions you are right, the minimum acceptable resolution is around 200 ppi.
This means that a 27 inch 5k monitor, with a resolution of 2880 by 5120 pixels, when viewed from a distance twice its height, i.e. about 86 cm (34 inch), provides a resolution close, but slightly less than that of typical human vision. (That viewing distance that is double the height corresponds to the viewing angle of camera lenses with normal focal length, which has been based on studies about the maximum viewing angles where humans are able to perceive a correct perspective when looking at an image as a whole.)
However, when not watching movies, but working with text documents, you normally stay closer to the monitor than that, so even a 5k monitor is not good enough (but an 8k monitor may be enough, so that might be the final monitor resolution, beyond which an increase is useless).