I need better eyes

[andrewducker]

Assuming that I am sitting 2 feet (or around 60cm) from my monitor, and it
is 22" across the diagonal at 16:9 ratio (so approx 19"x11") , what is the
maximum resolution that my eyes would be able to see?

Is 1080p (1920x1080) almost as good as it gets? Or is it worth pushing the
resolution much higher? I know that's only about 100dpi, but can I
actually resolve objects smaller than a quarter of a mm from two feet away?

(Come to think of it - 1080p being 100dpi on a 22" monitor seems an
unlikely coincidence - is that why it was chosen?)

Comments

[ciphergoth]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye 50 CPD gives me a resolution of 350 µrad; for a monitor 60cm away you can thus distinguish about a 0.2 mm feature, and the features on your monitor seem to be around 0.25mm - so it's not far off as good as it gets. However I think you have to go quite a way past that to be indistinguishable from perfect, because antialiasing and such aren't perfect remedies.

[zz]

according to wikipedia:
"In humans, 20/20 vision is the ability to resolve a spatial pattern separated by a visual angle of one minute of arc. A 20/20 letter subtends 5 minutes of arc total."

if i've got the trig right, you'd have roughly 2600x1550 arcminutes to play with if you had perfect 20/20 vision and sat in exactly the right place. and whether "pattern" means the same as what's shown on a computer screen.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

taking the opportunity to say that as far as I know 20/20 (or 6/6) is *average* vision. If yours is substantially worse or better then take that into acount.

[ckd]

In a discussion of the iPhone 4 display it's asserted that 60 pixels per degree is the point at which it "becomes progressively harder to tell the difference".

At two feet, 1" seems to be about 2.4 degrees, so that'd be somewhere just over 40 ppd.

(I had a coworker who used to run her CRT at the highest resolution she could and then use 4 point text in her terminal windows. I have good eyes, and even I couldn't read it from much distance.)

[simont]

100dpi or thereabouts certainly seems pretty standard. It also applies to 19" monitors at their native resolution of 1600×1200, and it's about the same on the absurd 30" monitor I bought last month that natively runs at 2560×1600.

I think the question of what your eyes are able to see depends rather on how they're trying to see it. If you display a one-pixel-wide horizontal line and elevate it by an extra pixel for some of its length, the points where it shifts back and forth are instantly obvious (at least to my eyesight) at normal viewing distance on any of those monitors, so the resolution could go a lot lower than that before a single pixel made no perceptible difference. And, along the same lines, a slanting line without antialiasing can look perceptibly jaggy, and a character in a font can look asymmetric if there's even a one-pixel difference between two lengths that ought to be the same (e.g. in my default browser font at work the + is annoyingly off-centre). On the other hand, if you display a true-colour JPEG of a photograph, I won't perceive any distracting blockiness at 100dpi on a monitor, so for those purposes (when the source material is kind of blurry anyway) it's good enough.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

there were some studies but that was for TVs Maybe still useful??

And I can certainly resolve far better than 1920 x 1080.

Good luck finding a monitor that will do anything more - even the larger sizes top out at the 1080p HD std in terms of res - most disappointing. Still, the 21" only just fits at my desk so I suppose that's as good as I am goig to get.

It's annoying cos I've used higher res than this on a smaller screen - one of Steven's old laptops did a few notches up, and Dev work is much nicer with ore screen real estate. I never got the hang of 2 monitors - probably cos i am not a touch typist

[andrewducker]

I can resolve better than 1920x1080 at a foot away on my 37" TV. At 6 feet on a 22" monitor? I don't think so.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

*moves back from monitor*

hmm, no real test but I can still read 10pt text (Times New Roman) at 100% at about 7-8ft. (21" 1920 x 1080) A sharper monitor would make it easier, though.

[drplokta]

1920 x 1080 is fairly close to the maximum resolution of a single DVI connection, so manufacturers who want to go higher have to invest in dual link DVI or DisplayPort. Among those who do, higher resolutions are common -- a 27" Apple Cinema Display does 2560 x 1440.

[andrewducker]

Which is 109DPI, a bit nicer, but not much.

Looks like 100DPI is pretty much what people aim for. I guess it would make sense for panel manufacturers to have a single production resolution.

[drplokta]

My 11" MacBook Air is 135dpi; 100dpi is not universal.

[andrewducker]

Interesting to know. Possibly designed to be looked at closer than a desktop screen. Hmm.

[dreema.livejournal.com]

i think screen res is one of the reasons i kept hold of my latitude c640 as long as i did, 1400x1050 compared to all the modern offerings of 1280x800. Looks massive in comparison.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

100dpi is another way of saying the dot pitch is about 0.25mm. Wikipedia has a table of dot pitches for a range of resolutions and screen sizes.

For some reason the display world talks about dot pitches and the printer world about dpi. This is like how rocket scientists do specific impulse and jet engine designers do specific fuel consumption: you can convert from one to the other, if you remember that they're upside down with respect to each other. (or American car manufacturers with mpg versus Europeans with litres per 100km)