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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

Sure, "optimize" it. But if you put a 300 ppi and 200 ppi screen next to each other and asked users "Do you want the higher resolution screen or do you want an extra 2 hours of battery life?" I don't think they'll choose the screen. I have 4K in a 24" desktop screen, and that pixel density is plenty high.

In the tradition of digital camera manufacturers and countless other tech companies, HP chasing the consumers who know that "4K" is the next-big-thing and that bigger numbers are always better.

To be fair to HP, they're doing it because it works. Doesn't mean it's "optimized." Or that I'd take one over the 2016 MBP.

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Lots of manufacturers have done that. The high resolution screens are frequently an optional item with known costs to battery life, and which directly cost money. If as you suggest they wouldn't sell, I seriously doubt we'd be seeing them so pervasively.

Also, pixels densities don't scale linearly. Having a 200 DPI desktop screen isn't equivalent to a 200 DPI laptop screen, else phones would still be at 480 x 270 or whatever.

Oh I'm not suggesting they don't sell, just that they shouldn't.

It's like how people will buy an 18MP camera with worse optics instead of a great 12MP camera because it has a bigger number. And god forbid they ever need to make a 20x30 print, you wouldn't want to see any pixels in that.

To take the opposite extreme of your 480 x 270 cell phone example: You can get an Xperia Z5 with a 5.5" 4K screen, but that doesn't mean it makes any sense.

4k phones aren't taking over the same way 4k laptops are. The best selling flagships don't have 4k screens. The largest push for 4k phones seems to be with VR as a justification, and VR sorely needs pixels.

Your comparison with phones would be more convincing if they ever really took off, but as far as I'm aware it never happened.

Can a phone drive that many pixels at a speed that's useful for VR?

4k makes an appreciable improvement on 15" screens, on 13" screens it's much more questionable, but OSX handles HiDPI well enough that I appreciate it

The problem is that the choices aren't well balanced. You can either have 1080p, which is noticeably low-resolution, or you can take a 30-40% battery life hit for 4k. Almost nobody except goes after the sensible middle ground of a 200 dpi display.

I expect the primary advantage of 4k for most people will be the ability to scale 2x and retain a decent resolution. You don't save much (cost, battery life) by going to an intermediary size, but lose flexibility. On top of that, there are definitely noticeable improvements to be had significantly above 200 dpi.

I wonder how many people opt for the higher density assuming it'll make a significant difference without really knowing what the visual threshold for being able to see a noticeable difference is.

^ This right here is my complaint, thanks for putting it succinctly.

HiDPI on Linux is still bad/spotty. If you run Linux, you'll see the difference quickly.

Typed on a Razer 13" with QHD display that I'm still constantly messing with (FC25 Cinnamon).

Would that be because you're using a desktop that's not HiDPI ready?

I had massive issues with the others (KDE5/Plasma, Unity, Gnome 3, etc). Cinnamon is actually the best in terms of usability. The other windoow managers were straight busted in terms of UI scaling, ability to sleep, disable the touchpad while typing, screensaver, etc.

Have you actually compared the same content on a 200 PPI screen vs. a 300 PPI screen? Even though you cannot see the individual pixels, text on a 300 PPI screen appears much sharper (when scaled to be the same physical size, of course).

The "visual threshold" doesn't mean "you will not see anything smaller than this so it cannot physically matter". You can still see a hairline even if it's less than 1/300 inch wide.

PPI (DPI) is actually bad unit for display's "sharpness", because it makes difficult to comparise different types of devices, meant to be watched from different distances. The correct universal unit is pixels-per-arcsecond, i.e. the ratio between PPI and viewing distance, making possible to compare e.g. mobile screen with video projector image.

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