15 inch - FHD vs FHD+

On a 15-inch laptop, is there a big difference in image quality between 1920 x 1080 resolution compared to 2880 x 1620, 3200 x 1800 or 3840 x 2160?

 

Depends on the image resolution, and the other specifications of the panel.


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I mean general image quality on the screen - text, programs, high-res media (which there will be a lot more of soon) and so on. I currently have a terrible 1360 x 738 display and I've seen my friend's Macbooks and the pixel density of the screens just blows me away. I wonder is there really a big difference on a 15-inch screen between the FHD (1920 x 1080) and UHD. Can you see the pixels on a 15.6 inch FHD screen? Does it get noticeably sharper with a UHD (2880 x 1620, 3200 x 1800, 3840 x 2160) screen, or is it still pretty close to a FHD (1920 x 1080) screen?

@alexhawker: I noticed in your signature that you have a 3k display on your laptop. Can you try changing the resolution to FHD and then back and saying how big the difference is in overall sharpness?

 

That's not really the same. It looks good at 1080p but slightly fuzzy (because of the scaling).


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I would guess that if you were really looking for them and got very close, you could see the pixels on any display. If the intent of the question is "are the pixels noticeable on a 1920x1080 screen?" the answer is typically no. I don't notice pixels on my screen at all. That can change if the pixels have a larger-than-average border around them, which can lead to a "screen door effect" on some panels.

As stated, sharpness depends on the source of what you want to view. High-definition video is distributed at 1920x1080, so a panel with that resolution would render such a video as sharply as one with higher resolution and sharper than one with lower resolution. High-resolution still images and 4k video would need a panel that has a resolution equal or higher than the resolution of the source to display at ideal sharpness.

But what about everything that has lower resolution than the screen? The higher the resolution, the smaller it gets. It will be equally sharp, just smaller. This can be particularly problematic with text, as it can shrink to truly miniscule proportions on very high resolution displays and become difficult to read.

But wait, you may say, text on the Retina Macbook still looks great - and that happens due to scaling. Apple designed the system to use 4 times the number of pixels necessary to create the image on the screen, which increases the sharpness by reducing or eliminating subpixel differences. However, unless the pixel dimensions of your screen are an exact multiple of the dimensions you want, scaling creates blur instead of reducing it. And there are not yet enough programs (or websites) that are designed to be scaled, which means some things are going to look worse on a higher-resolution scaled panel than on a somewhat lower-resolution native panel.