At what level in resolution (4k, 8k, etc) is something higher resolution than average human eyes max out at and why?
In: Biology
Personally I literally cannot tell the difference between 1080p and 4k
Don’t know if I’m blind, stupid, or just don’t care enough to see the difference
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It’s gonna vary based on the distance to the screen and how you define “max out”. Also, human vision isn’t very accurately represented by pixels per square inch (PPI), which is what we use for screens.
For example, someone with 20/20 vision sitting 1 foot from a screen could see roughly 477-573 PPI, but that just means they wouldn’t be able to see the white space between pixels at that distance. At 15 inches away, that number drops into the 350 PPI range.
Sitting 6 feet away means you could see around 240 PPI, but it’s disingenuous because that would mean a 24″ screen at 1080p would mathematically appear the same as a 60″ 4k HD screen, which we know to be incorrect from practice. This is because pixels vary across manufacturers and types of screens.
And then you have to worry about things like lower fidelity cameras, video or image compression, etc. A 720p video is going to appear worse the better your screen is, regardless of PPI or distance to the screen, for example.
So, to be technical about it, there really just isn’t a good or accurate way to describe human vision in PPI.
Eye-limiting resolution is about one arc-~~second~~minute†. That means that when you have a 60 x 60 pixel patch that’s 1˚ by 1˚, that’s the most a person with 20/20 vision can distinguish.
So, your 4K display has 2160 lines vertically. So if you sit far enough back that the height of the TV is 36˚ tall, then the 4K display has eye-limiting resolution. However, the human field of view is 135˚ by 120˚, so it takes a lot of pixels to cover that. The eye doesn’t have its best resolution everywhere, so you could make a special eye-like display with lots of pixels in the middle and fewer pixels in the periphery, but that would be super difficult to make. The very agile muscles that rotate the eyes are also a problem for this scheme.
Edit: † There was a typo in this line, it should be arc-minute, as I used in the other calculations. Sorry.
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