PPI - Hitting Sweet Spot For Human Eyes or Continually Changing?

Do you think we are reaching the ideal PPI range for human eye looking at a laptop / desktop display, or is this something that will continue evolving over time?

Each time there has been a significant bump in display resolution for monitors and laptop displays, there have been some who preferred the previous generation or felt, for example, 1080p was simply too detailed for a 14-15" display. Now we have 1440p smartphones well over 500PPI.

In a couple years, will my 1080p display feel the way it does today to boot up my old 1024x600 Toshiba, like moving lego blocks around on a chunky desktop?

Should I go for 3k/4k display on my next laptop if I plan to be using it for several years? Any of you guys been using laptop with Retina/3k or 4k display for a long time, how does it feel to look at 1080p display now?

 

Speaking strictly mobile, I think it will be sort of how it is now for many years to come. By that, I mean:

1080p is the standard for gaming and has been for a long time. However, 1440p and 1600p gaming exists now and is becoming more and more accepted in the gaming community. I believe in 2016, hardware will finally be able to support QHD+ 1600p gaming at 60+ FPS and this will eventually replace 1080p as the standard (maybe in 2017 or 2018), and what is now the 1440p, 1600p & 3k/4k area that we're stepping into will eventually transform into 5k/6k displays from 2019+.

In a sense, I see it as a bell curve, 1080p being at the beginning and 5k/6k being at the end, with 3k/4k at the peak. Right now we're slightly above 1080p, but still closer to 1080p than to 3k/4k. Why would I think 5k/6k is at the end of the bell curve? Because 5k is 5120x2880p, which is exactly double that of 2560x1440p, and we're just now seeing hardware that can handle gaming at these resolutions (1440p/1600p). Hardware would have to more than double performance to be able to handle gaming on 5k displays at 60+ FPS (Titan Z levels). Also, I think 5k is at the end of that spectrum because of scaling, which has been an issue for so long, and Windows hasn't even addressed it, yet. And then there's GPU scaling.

I also believe there will be new technologies like DSR which will keep 1080p around for a bit longer. 1080p is a sweet spot and I don't think it will ever be like "moving blocks" around on a tablet or something.

 

Remember the display PPI is not the only thing. Text scaling and filters are also to be taken into account, and should be done so heavily. I personally do not believe I need above 1440p for a main/gaming screen (though if I never stream or record video anymore I would take 1600p as I love 16:10). I likely never will, especially in a laptop format. 1440p 120Hz pascal GPUs skylake CPUs (hexacore pls) will be my perfection.

 

They say around 300 PPI is the point where it is indiscernible to most humans. Of course there will be some exceptions, but for the most part if you look at the 1080p 4" or 5" phones which are in the 400+ PPI range you should theoretically be able to scale indefinitely and not notice any aliasing. I think 4k on a 15" or 17" laptop is ideal from an image perspective but from a gaming performance and OS scaling perspective we're far from there.

 

last time I checked a ppi calculator, I think my 15" 1080p display had a similar ppi to a 27" 1440p display, albeit the 27" display is almost twice as big. In terms of pixel clarity though I definitely wouldn't downscale to, say for example, a 22" or 24" 1080p display.

 

I was going blind with my 15' 1080p laptop, so I hope that text scaling becomes much better before the PPI standard goes to crazy values.

 

Any improvement to high res UI scaling in Windows 10? (Or Windows 8, for that matter, I'm still on Win7 )

 

Continually changing as our eyesight changes with age.

 

So in my case that means, what? 10ppi is adequate?

 

I think you should go see an optometrist if that's the case.

 

Dell will start hiring/consulting with ophthalmologists.

 

Which is why (after much persuasion by members on this forum) I decided to go for the 1080p display rather than the 1620p display on my P35X v3!

I'm one of the few people out there who eyes are (gradually) improving as I get older! I have astigmatism in my eyes resulting in a minor case of long sightedness. My eyes have been steadily improving, requiring less powerful prescription lenses each time I go for a test, since I was a teenager

 

I'm one of those people with ridiculously good eyes. I can put on anyone's (and I mean anyone's) glasses and see with a large degree of accuracy (able to read like the vision test boards) at acceptable distances. But I don't normally need glasses of any kind.

 

In my case, I have the exact same prescription I had way back when I first got glasses at the age of 14, yet optometrists refuse to sell me contacts or glasses unless I go back and spend X dollars on an eye exam with the same exact results every damn year.

 

It's very common for people to develop hyperopia at a certain age. A friend of mine used to be shortsighted, but later, as he got older, his eyes got corrected.

 

I had laser surgery about 9 years ago and have better than "perfect" vision. I couldn't see past an arm's length before. Just I'm starting to get far sighted, need reading glasses soon I think. Anything less than 2 feet away gets a bit hard to read.

 

Old topic; however, seems we might have reached the "sweet spot" for high PPI on a small LCD display.



Sony has announced the Xperia Z5 Premium smartphone with 5.5" 4k display. This is 806 PPI. Would we actually be able to distinguish the difference between this and, say a smartphone with 2k or 3k display without holding it up to our eyeball or using a microscope?

Setting aside UI scaling problems with Windows 7/8/10, do you think electronics manufacturers will continue the PPI race over the coming years, eventually reaching a point with 8k laptop panels and beyond, where we look back at 1080p/3k/4k 15.6" laptop displays the same way we now see old school 640x480 CRT monitors as unworkable, something like pixelated lego block collages?

Is it mainly a problem of proper UI scaling, or do you believe we have already reached the optimal display resolution for actually getting work done on a typical 15.6" laptop display at arm's length distance with normal human vision?

 

Scaling on the desktop of non-mobile OSes continues to be a challenge. Only when this scaling can be done consistently without obvious error will resolutions above 2k become really useful to the majority of people, in my opinion.

 

This is what we will all be wearing in the future for high resolution monitors.

 

Yeah right. Everybody already forgot Google Glass.

 

Yep. Anything that is an accessory you have to wear will just be a fad or niche. Even Oculus as great as people claim it will be, still requires wearing a head mounted display tethered to your desktop. Big AAA titles may eventually support something like the Oculus but will never become the only way to play.

 

But, but...what about Minority Report style contact lenses?



I've been waiting for the video editing application ever since Tom Cruise showed us how it's done.

 

don't forget that apple is advertising the new ipad pro as a 4k video editing platform. lol

 

Seriously? Are they porting FCP to the app store?



I suppose you can do it with proxy files, though. iPad Pro probably has faster CPU than the machines I first used to edit NTSC and Betacam footage.

 

Unlike Android phones, where hardware is the main limitation (battery capacity, GPU power etc.), software is the main limitation for Windows PCs and high resolutions (scaling issues).

 

It's been a long time since I've seen a modern app totally crap the bed in hidpi. It's getting more and more rare. I switched back to 1800p from 900p a little while ago and it's working fantastically.

 

For everybody who complained about crappy panels for 17.3" displays, I have some news for you:

JDI has announced 8k 120Hz 17.3" panel with 551 PPI: http://www.j-display.com/english/news/2015/20151001.html

 

So who the heck is JDI and we go from 1080p to 8k... Hmm

Sent from my VS980 4G using Tapatalk

 

Baller... That's awesome. I've been glad my laptop has an 1800p panel lately. Pretty much everything scales nicely at this point. Things have changed much in the last year and a half for windows

 

8K? What like 7680x4320? That's sixteen times the amount of pixels compared to 1080p, I doubt even four Volta based GPUs will be able to run games at 60 FPS, nevermind laptops lol.

 

I imagine the first laptop with this panel will probably ship with 940M and ULV processor - OMG so extreme!

 

Would be awesome for VR, though. We just need GPUs to catch up.

 

With proper scaling, I am all for 4K at current laptop sizes. But gaming at such res? Nah, not yet haha

Even smartphones with their insane resolutions, they can't really game at native, and end up scaling all the time. And they still overheat.

 

JDI are a big Japanese display maker... They make quite a few Mobile phone pannels for the likes of Apple,Sony, LG etc... This is interesting indeed.. I'd personally like 2K/3K/4K 120Hz display instead tbh....