The resolution of the iPhone X is 1125 x 2436. If I buy a new 24 inch monitor Wirecutter currently recommends a monitor has a resolution of 1,920 × 1,200 Pixel.
What’s happening here? We aren’t monitor producers trying to sell us monitors with a higher resolution?
The typical distance between your eyes and the display is closer for a smartphone than for a monitor. If you had both and they had the same resolution the smartphone-pixel would usually take up more of your field of view than the monitor-pixel. The closer the display is to your eyes, the more pixels you’d like it to have. Think about VR headsets as an extreme case: their displays have resolutions like 2160x1200 and people complain that they can see every pixel.
And relating to that, adding more pixels has diminishing returns. Personally for instance I don’t care about adding more pixels to current-gen monitors (while keeping the size constant; larger screens need more pixels). Some people would certainly be able to make use of it, but I would hardly benefit. Improvements in color would be very nice though and it’s nice to see things start moving into that direction.
The typical distance between your eyes and the display is closer for a smartphone than for a monitor.
That’s true and relevant but clearly only part of the story, because for some time almost all mobile phones have had displays whose resolution is high enough that in normal use even people with quite good eyesight don’t see individual pixels, whereas even now most monitors don’t have that property.
My slightly grumpy theory is that Apple introduced silly-high dpis as a unique selling point and the other manufacturers had to follow. Sure, some increase in pixel density was useful but they overshot the ideal. (maybe my eyesight is worse than usual, or I have atypical usecases?)
I’m not sure you would consciously notice an improvement in the display quality that would increase your reading speed by 2% or that would make you less tired while reading.
When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone 4, and with it the first Retina display, he described it as having a screen with so many pixels packed closely together that they were imperceptible to the human eye at a distance of twelve inches. He went to great lengths to explain that, because the iPhone 4’s screen packed in 300 pixels per inch, most people wouldn’t see them at all when the phone was a foot from their eyes.
They are. For instance, here are some you can buy from Amazon. Maybe the question is why they aren’t trying very hard to sell us higher-resolution monitors, and I don’t know the answer to that. At no time have I understood why users and vendors of computer displays seem so uninterested in their resolution.
But I think part of the story is that if, at roughly fixed physical size, you increase the resolution a lot then either everything becomes very small or you need some sort of fancy resolution-dependent scaling, and the first is bad for users and the second requires either extra work from all software creators or some sort of cleverness in the operating system that delivers nice-looking results even on displays whose resolution is very different from what applications are implicitly expecting.
Those are both things that are just starting to happen recently in the world of Actual Computers. It was able to happen earlier in the world of mobile devices because the OS vendors have more power and individual application authors have less freedom there, and because the whole industry got started later when it was easier to see that display resolutions might improve a lot.
The resolution of the iPhone X is 1125 x 2436. If I buy a new 24 inch monitor Wirecutter currently recommends a monitor has a resolution of 1,920 × 1,200 Pixel.
What’s happening here? We aren’t monitor producers trying to sell us monitors with a higher resolution?
The typical distance between your eyes and the display is closer for a smartphone than for a monitor. If you had both and they had the same resolution the smartphone-pixel would usually take up more of your field of view than the monitor-pixel. The closer the display is to your eyes, the more pixels you’d like it to have. Think about VR headsets as an extreme case: their displays have resolutions like 2160x1200 and people complain that they can see every pixel.
And relating to that, adding more pixels has diminishing returns. Personally for instance I don’t care about adding more pixels to current-gen monitors (while keeping the size constant; larger screens need more pixels). Some people would certainly be able to make use of it, but I would hardly benefit. Improvements in color would be very nice though and it’s nice to see things start moving into that direction.
That’s true and relevant but clearly only part of the story, because for some time almost all mobile phones have had displays whose resolution is high enough that in normal use even people with quite good eyesight don’t see individual pixels, whereas even now most monitors don’t have that property.
Agreed!
My slightly grumpy theory is that Apple introduced silly-high dpis as a unique selling point and the other manufacturers had to follow. Sure, some increase in pixel density was useful but they overshot the ideal. (maybe my eyesight is worse than usual, or I have atypical usecases?)
I’m not sure you would consciously notice an improvement in the display quality that would increase your reading speed by 2% or that would make you less tired while reading.
My understanding is that there is a limit of what resolution the human eye can resolve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina_Display
https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/apple/what-retina-hd-display-are-they-worth-money-apple-3466732/
They are. For instance, here are some you can buy from Amazon. Maybe the question is why they aren’t trying very hard to sell us higher-resolution monitors, and I don’t know the answer to that. At no time have I understood why users and vendors of computer displays seem so uninterested in their resolution.
But I think part of the story is that if, at roughly fixed physical size, you increase the resolution a lot then either everything becomes very small or you need some sort of fancy resolution-dependent scaling, and the first is bad for users and the second requires either extra work from all software creators or some sort of cleverness in the operating system that delivers nice-looking results even on displays whose resolution is very different from what applications are implicitly expecting.
Those are both things that are just starting to happen recently in the world of Actual Computers. It was able to happen earlier in the world of mobile devices because the OS vendors have more power and individual application authors have less freedom there, and because the whole industry got started later when it was easier to see that display resolutions might improve a lot.