What is the point of 4k on small display?

This thread isn't about gaming on a laptop. It is about being able to tell quality differences on a small monitor (see first post).

I grant you that the monitor advancements made will be just as (if not more than) important than the pure resolution increases I'm looking forward to. But none/little of those advancements will be implemented or make sense in an equal resolution monitor of today in the near future (up to 2 years away) and especially in the medium/far future (up to a decade away).

They will be implemented along with the higher resolution panels that are inevitably coming over that same time period.

Even if they are introduced in the low resolutionmonitors we have today; where the new display tech coming down the road will shine isn't with what we have now (resolution-wise). It will be in the future monitors that, for those that care, will make today's monitors seem like a coarse and veiled example of viewing the subject matter (whether it be fine art, word/excel files... or simply their O/S) they're most interested in.

How can I tell that today's notebook monitors/screens have so far to go? Because if I compare an image of the view I have from my studio window (yeah; I'm a pro photographer) - the view out the window still looks better.

(And that is also true for the many times higher quality monitors I use too - let alone the lower quality examples found in notebooks).

All the tech you wish for and all the resolution increases I'm hoping for, together, still won't achieve that standard I hold all tech to; the real world as interpreted by our senses, directly.

Gaming on a 4K notebook is different but similar too. But I've never mistaken any game*** as a real 'experience' either (at any resolution).


*** Note: I don't and never have 'gamed' - but I've watched over the shoulder of gamers...

 

I'm well aware that this thread isn't just about gaming at 4k (I read this entire thread before posting, not just the first post). None of the points I made in my post are restricted to gaming.

As for making things photorealistic (or "window realistic"), resolution increases per se will not achieve this. As I believe you've recognized, advancements in other display technologies are more important for reaching this goal. But those advancements will most likely end up only on high-res displays. It's similar to why I have a 4K television now: I would be fine with 1080p, but the best-looking televisions (read: best contrast ratios, motion blur, etc.) are all 4K now. Where you and I might part ways is my understanding that there's nothing, other than market forces, that ties advancements in other display technologies to high-res screens. There's no technological reason why we can't have QLED displays that are 1080p. And for most display sizes and normal viewing distances, the difference between that display and a 4K display with QLED would not be drastic (and the difference between 4k and 8k unnoticeable). But we're never going to get tech like that on lower-res screens, so despite the diminishing returns of resolution increases, we'll all end up with 4k and 8k displays eventually (and we can only pray for better scaling).

 

Assuming 'equal quality' as per:

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-on-small-display.806507/page-2#post-10559255


Higher resolution can and will achieve making things appear better than photorealistic. Especially see the last paragraph in the above link about how blocky shadows are and how physically more pixels achieve better results.

An 1080P display with QLED will look inferior to a 4K display for the same reasons; our eyes don't only expect the largest range between bright and dark colours - they expect that displayed range to not be blocky either. 1080P guarantees 'blocky'. 4K+; less so.

The optimal distance to enjoy even a 34 Foot 4K screen is ~25 feet or less. Anything closer is better for those with lessor vision. Anything farther and the resolution offered by that 34 Foot 4K screen is wasted (even with above average eyesight).

When there are 8K and higher resolution panels that we can put in our notebooks; I'll bet that they'll exist for a reason (and I hope I'll be able to take advantage of them at that time too). Not everyone will - but that is true for most high end tech.

Our eyes (and all of our senses, actually) are not static in how they process stimulus. They have a very large range indeed.

There are no current monitors (certainly not 'consumer' versions...) that can approach even 10% of what our eyes can handle. We have a long way to go (hardware wise).

More pixels is what will drive this. Because it is the easiest on the hardware requirement side and will give the biggest result as far as our eyes/brains are concerned. Purely because the graduations between colors and brightness (or, lack thereof...) will be smoother and will for a time*** be able to fool our vision (eye/brain) to believe it is (more) 'real' than anything we have seen reproduced before.

*** Until the next time we see the next step up in the tech(s) used to reproduce our analogue world (and senses) with mere digital hardware (i.e. in discrete steps, not continuous...)

 

Where does this number come from?

Past a certain point (and that point is already upon us), pixels increases cannot play much of a role in achieving photorealism on notebook displays. I assume you're familiar with tools and diagrams like those available here, which describe the viewing distance and sizes needed to take advantage of high-res displays: http://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-size/size-to-distance-relationship

The optimal distance to see 4K on a large 25" monitor is a mere 1.5 feet/0.46 meters. When 8K comes around, you'll have to sit much closer than that to see the difference between 4K and 8K, and even closer for smaller laptop displays like 15.6".

Most likely, the reason will be for marketing more than for anything inherent about 8K improving picture quality. Just as many consumers are buying 4K televisions not realizing that they will likely sit much too far away from the screen to actually benefit from it, they will do the same for 8K, and 8K display technology will likewise be put into computers despite offering marginal benefit at normal viewing distances.

 

See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_eye#Field_of_view

That 'number' is my personal estimate. I think it may even be too high. From the quote above; don't get caught up in the f-stop 'numbers'... there are many more things that make a difference to how we perceive images.

With our eyes able to possibly see a single photon (see link above) - more pixels allow for smoother graduations in both brightness and colors - that is 'photorealism' to me. In nature; you don't see a hard line dividing one specific color to another - even if it may seem like that at first glance.

That link is the same one I have already posted; being able to see the resolution 'difference' is not the same thing as being able to get a higher quality image view from the same distance.

TV's are not computer monitors (thankfully). Watching a movie for a couple of hours with friends is not the same thing as staring at a computer monitor when you're trying to complete a project.

When a small handheld device (less than 6") shows clearly the benefit of higher (and higher) resolutions with how easy on the eyes it is - even with scaling - a notebook's monitor will be just as eagerly anticipated - even at 12" (and larger).

With your analogy of consumers buying 4K TV's and then sitting too far for optimal viewing? I have to agree. However, that doesn't negate the other benefits they get with a 4K TV vs. their older 1080P models. Yeah; the effective resolution may be the same at their viewing position, but mere resolution by itself isn't what is the draw to them in the first place.

With seemingly step-less graduations (shades and colors) vs. their previous model, the upgrade is easily worth it. Even to a same size screen. And assuming their eyesight is good, of course.

There are many more important aspects to consider than just viewing distance, FOV and simple 'resolution' when all of the previous aspects have been properly addressed.

You are welcome to believe that marketing will be the reason to only offer those improvements in the latest, high resolution models.

I know that just like computer platforms; a full build on the new tech is (almost) always preferable to upgrading just certain components and living with the compromises that entails.

 

These numbers seem more applicable to controlled laboratory settings. I'd be skeptical of them being useful in determining what a good consumer product is.

 

This is how it's always been. It was the same with TN vs IPS panels. A really good TN panel (aside from the inferior viewing angles) could go toe-to-toe with a really good IPS panel. But all the development (at the time) when into the (pricier) IPS panels, so you were often left with only inferior TN panels to choose from.

Same thing now. A 4K panel is usually superior to a FHD not because the increased resolution makes it better, but because OEMs produce better quality 4K panels than they do FHD ones. OEMS could make a FHD panel that was just as good (albeit with a lower PPI) than a 4K panel. They just don't seem to want to anymore. Likely they figured out they can charge more for a similar quality 4K panel, and hence see increased profits from doing so.

 

Odd in laptops, considering the relatively high quality FHD panels available for standalone monitors still. Though that's mostly on the high refresh low latency side.

 

I just bought a 3440x1440 widescreen 21:9 monitor, and even on a 34" widescreen, the text is barely readable, 27" just barely goes, but dear lord going lower is impossible, now scaling all of that down onto a 17-18 inch laptop, or 15 inch, is out of this world.

Also, my monitor isn't even 4k. Jesus, I wish scaling in Windows wasn't utter cr**.

 

The tiny text is something you just have to put up with if you want that sweet shorter battery life and lower framerate. The compromises we make.

 

Barely readable because it was too small to read, or because...???

What programs do you run that Windows has such trouble scaling?

 

Windows itself has horrible % scaling.

Look at OSX and Linux, beautiful.

Almost too small to read. Almost. Unless I sit close, but then the monitor's width blinds me.

 

Nothing beats being able to zoom so freely at any time on a Mac OS. This is a feature MS need to get on.

 

I keep hearing that but have yet to impact me or my clients...

OS/X and Linux may be beautiful. What I need from an O/S though is more than skin deep.

The aspect ratio of the monitor you choose is the issue then. Not (just) Windows scaling problems.

 

Even 16:9 might be problematic if you're talking a larger screen and having to sit close. But if it's one of those ultrawides, definitely would contribute.

 

I assume you aren't talking about the most recent Windows 10 updates?

Because this is so unfair to claim. I've said it time and again, most daily task for most people now scale far better on Windows 10 than they used to.

Chrome is fine, Microsoft Office is fine, music players are fine... That alone is like most of what people do... Not to mention games are fine.

The largest remaining problem is with the developers who have implemented scaling without the crispness. All that means is that Steam for example looks like it's at 1080p instead of 4K. It is still easy to read. I haven't run into a program that looks tiny from lack of scaling in a long time now.

This problem is being overblown by a lot of you, it is quite realistic to use a high dpi display on a small windows laptop at this point.

Did you enable scaling? Because it sounds like if everything including the windows desktop is small you just didn't turn it on...

 

I am not, correct.

Yes.

 

May I ask what version of Windows you are running?

 

W10, Pro x64 - Creators. 15063

 

And your literal desktop icons fails to scale?

 

Apps never do universally adjust to scaling in Windows.

Everything is living its own life. My icons are the only thing looking good in this cluster f*** of a scaling soup.

 

What are your main apps?

I'm saying all this because I also own numerous 4K and 1440p displays.

 

VirtualBox, Sandboxie and a few others.

The thing is, that setting anything above 125% - things can get weird. And it is sad to depend on 3rd party programs to fix those issues. Oh well.

 

I don't think I've seen a single scaling issue in my 1440p except that the computer tries to keep that resolution in Vive's desktop mode, which is not the display's fault.

 

The Steam client looks like crap, even when you fiddle with the scaling. But that's Steam.

Some games have issues with fullscreen border-less (those this is likely mostly un-optimized games having issues with your game resolution not matching your desktop resolution).

While on the whole I didn't have many issues, every now and then something would crop up that was attributable to Windows scaling issues (on Win10). My 1440p desktop monitor has no issues on Win 8.1, but that's because it's a 25" display.

Overall I agree that most commonly-used programs are ok (web browsing, Youtube, email, office, etc.) but there are a few issues here and there that you simply don't get with a quality FHD. And you take a massive battery hit with the 4K display, depending on the machine. So assuming you find a FHD display with equal brightness/colour distribution/viewing angles/colour accuracy, I see no reason to go for the 4K (yet). Of course, the catch here is that most UHD displays are superior to FHD displays in most of these areas...

 

The difference between 1920x1200 (on my Dell M6500) and 3840x2160 (on my Lenovo P70) is night and day.

I mostly use my laptops for either image (and sometimes video) editing, or text-heavy work (programming), in addition to the usual browsing and such, running Linux. The higher quality of the display in general helps with the former, but the real payoff is for text, where I can get quite a lot more legible text on the screen. On a ~120 DPI screen, the limiting factor for me is the cell size for a character (6x10 is what I use in emacs for editing text and terminal windows for shell interaction; smaller than that and there simply aren't enough pixels for good legibility). My UHD screen is maybe 230 DPI, but I set my system up to lie and say it's 132 DPI. For text work, I use a 18 pixel font that's somewhat narrower; it's not quite as nice as the 6x10 bitmap font, but I can get quite a bit more on the screen with considerably better legibility.

The few times I boot Windows I set scaling to 175%.

 

I think a lot of times we assume people think they'll be gaming on a 4K display (which does not work so well), but for content creation, the additional detail and quality of display is much more important than FPS and more importantly can be shown without massive GPU use. While I would personally want more screen real estate for that (at least 17") balancing that with mobility makes a 4K 15" more attractive.

 

On consumer PC forums using relatively high spec systems for anything but graphics-heavy AAA gaming has always been blasphemy. I actually find NBR much better than average in the regard. I guess the hardcore population are still busy laughing at the concept of gaming laptop on other sites.

 

There's also a problem with weird expectations, they do build workstations, but people don't like the prices so they go look at gaming systems (which aren't built for work or content creation) and wonder why they're not the same.

 

It's al relative

For instance my phone supports 1080 or 1440p or 4k resolution and allows me to choose
I leave my phone at 1080p because I can't tell any difference between 1080p and 4k on such a small screen, maybe other eyes can

But on a laptop, even though the screen is relatively small - the texture boost that games get will be noticeable - you can try this yourself, grab a youtube 4k video and watch it on your 1080p screen, even on 1080p that 4k video will look beter than then 1080p video

On a tv its most noticeable, 1080p looks very bad on my 55 inch tv where as 4k just amazing

 

Youtube is a not a good example. 4K looks better because of the awful compression YouTube does. The compression artifacts aren't as noticeable with a 4K upload. But it still looks good on a 1080p LCD if you play with 4K quality because of the less noticeable compression artifacts.

I have a 65" TV and 99% of what I watch is 1080p because that's really what's available. 4K looks better on a big screen because, well, it's a much larger physical display.

Games on a 15" 4K at 4K look no better than a 1080p game on a 1080p LCD. 1080p on a 4K LCD has noticeable pixelation despite the 2x2 linear downscale. I'd rather have native 1080p look good than 4K that looks worse at 1080p. Because there really aren't any mobile GPU's that can game at 4K/60 consistently. Personally I'd rather have a 2560x1600 LCD, but that's another story.

 

That middle ground is the sweet spot right now since most higher end GPUs can do 60 at 2560x1440 or 2560x1600 without much argument where they struggle with it on 4K.

 

I do see a lot of assumptions here that people are buying systems for gaming, even when that's not stated. Maybe that's what most higher-end systems are targeted at because maybe that's where the market is, but for content creation, programming (which, after all, is a form of content creation), and the like, there tends to be much less concern with frame rate and more with color quality, clean-ness of the display, compute capability of the GPU, and that.

 

im in the market for a new gaming laptop and considering both 1440p and 1080 panels, but the 120hz refresh at 1080p just feels like a bigger step up than 1440p

 

That's not entirely the fault of the people responding. A lot of the why doesn't it have 4K complaints seem to be about gaming focused systems in the first place. I can understand lamenting the lack of proper workstations, but to me I keep seeing "Oh, they released the GameMax GGEZ100000 EXTREME ULTIMATE GAMING EDITION model with a 144Hz 1920x1080? Wow, what a useless machine for content creation. It doesn't even have a 4K monitor. I don't need all that gaming stuff in the laptop." I'm exaggerating of course, but it seems to show up in a lot of discussions about laptops that were never built for the kind of work in the first place.

 

There are some 1440p 120Hz models out there, but they're not terribly common.

 

If your phone has a 4K screen, then you can't choose. It always uses 4K regardless of what scaling you choose.

If it doesn't have 4K you also can't choose. The native resolution is not 'switchable' - it is a physical property of the screen in question.

 

I did find one only when looking at the shops over here - which was the gigabyte auros, but that model didn't have gsync which I want as well - it's also relatively thin and makes me concerned about throttling and overheating - 1440p 120hz isn't exactly easy to push, even for a gtx1080

 

Maybe it's just the texture resolution - while the output resolution stays the same, you can change the resolution of the elements that appear on the screen - the android feature says it saves battery life

 

Curious; which specific phone are we talking about?

 

I'm assuming @Naeky has a newer phone, my GS7 does this if you change the performance mode (GS7's resolution is 2560x1440 in high performance mode)

 

Check Clevo resellers, I've seen a panel like that in a couple of them, but I don't think they support G-Sync with it installed.

 

But this is still a software hack, correct? You're not physically changing the inherent capabilities of the monitor/panel itself.

 

To understand the idea behind bumping up the resolution, One would have to understand the visible resolution for a regular human eye. Taken from the eyewear blog which summarize it nicely:

“The visual resolution of the human eye is about 1 arc minute.

At a viewing distance of 20″, that translates to about 170 dpi (or pixels-per-inch / PPI), which equals a dot pitch of around 0.14 mm. LCD monitors today have a dot pitch of .18mm to .24mm.

A 30″ monitor with a 16:9 aspect ratio would be sized around 26″ x 15″. To achieve 170 dpi, it would need a resolution of 4400 x 2600 pixels [a MacBook Retina display is 2880 x 1880].

If you want to lean in closer, say to 10″, and still not see the pixels, then you would need to double that resolution.”

So it depends on distance from monitor. But the average is 20” then you would need 170dpi to not see visible pixels, then 200dpi for refined and 300dpi for crystal clear images that even if you leaned 10” closer you would still not see the pixels.

 

It doesn't change the number of pixels, correct. Does seem to have a significant effect on battery life though. Probably because less processor power is needed to render before sending the image to the display.

 

To add further to the points below:

Those are the averages in human vision - there are a considerable number of people that have more acute vision too. Some, substantially so.

In printed output, one can see 2880 dpi vs. 1440 dpi easily enough. At any reasonable distance. Let alone 300 dpi from the late 1990's...

I've stated this before: at 121MP or higher is where I would like our output devices to be at before I can say differences don't need to be debated anymore. (Yeah minimum of 15,192 x 7,992 = 121414464 pixels panels of any size I care to look at...).

This is assuming that to get to that at the size of panels in use today (from 4" phones to 120" TV's) that other artifacts and visual 'noise' isn't introduced by the tech to get us there.

Our eyes, collectively and individually, are not a fixed 'number' bm... Along with the brain they interpret analogue signals and therefore have many more details, nuances and aspects than mere resolution can measure.

The Surface Studio's spec's are interesting here:
4500 x 3000 pixels at 28" (192dpi)

Have to love it when a manufacturer - even MS in this case - chooses specs for reason.

 

Yep. If the LCD is locked at 60FPS, it will save energy rendering fewer pixels. But if the LCD refresh is open, it will likelyy burn more or energy because it's rendering more pixels per second.

 

Oh yeah, forgot about Hz, it does drop to 30 from 60 as well.

 

Yeah; that's the only reason it is more power efficient.

All the hardware is still processing for a 4K screen, it is just allowed to do it slower.

Of course a still image will look identical then...

same hardware, of course

 

I'll try and test with mine when I get a chance, I think all those settings are individually adjustable with a recent update.