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Comment by spystath | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately at 4k nothing over 22" is 200+ dpi. It's definitely better than the run of the mill 90-100 dpi monitors but not enough to fully eliminate the need for AA. You need to push around a great amount of pixels to have crisp text with no AA. Presently 5k desktop monitors go for $2.5k+, 8k for $4.5k, which honestly is not terrible but still quite expensive. Even those are at 32"+ which defeats the purpose (stil below 200 dpi). It seems like the desktop display industry is not interested in pursuing this, going instead for faster refresh rates, as such it's unlikely that we will see 250+ dpi displays on anything other than sub-15" laptops and phones.

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DPI is the wrong measure. What matters is dots per degree. If the device is 2x further way, it can have half the DPI. At typical viewing distances, my phone covers about 1/3rd the fov of my monitor, despite having being a 16x smaller screen. As such, 4k is totally sufficient for pretty much all screen sizes. If the screen gets bigger, you get further away.

Yes and no. For laptop screen sizes (15" and less), 4k is currently pretty good for text quality. However, for ~27" monitors, even accounting for a greater viewing distance, we're still a bit short.

My 14" laptop has the same pixel count as my 27" monitor. Sure I keep my laptop closer to my face normally, but I'm not keeping my 27" far enough to have comparable density (for my current viewing distance, it should be more than double to match the dots/degree).

That being said, I cannot reiterate how much difference this makes for text quality despite still not being ideal.

Honestly for me, I can't see any difference between 1440p and 4k on my 13 inch laptop.

Try it on a mac.

Since Apple removed subpixel AA everywhere, by default, unless you re-enable it you get absolutely gorgeous text rendering on the internal screen but as soon as you plug in a non-hidpi external screen (such as my 34” widescreen which has a 50% lower physical resolution than the laptop) it devolves into a blurry and barely readable mess.

I once tried an 8K monitor and it was amazing how big a difference it made. The tiniest differences in fonts were easily visible. It was like a high quality glossy print that could move and update.

    It seems like the desktop display industry is 
    not interested in pursuing [300dpi screens at > 22"]

My not-very-informed guess is that it's largely (or at least partially) a yield issue.

Insanely high pixel counts => More chances of a bad pixel

Huge screens => Lots of waste when you have to throw a panel away or sell it as a B-quality screen because of dead pixel(s)

I think they'd love to sell us insane 8K 32" screens but, doing it in an economically feasible manner is another story.

Of course I'm just guessing. Not sure how much of the problem is yield, how much is waiting for baseline graphics hardware to catch up, and how much is lack of interest/demand.

Yet TVs are sold with huge pixel counts and even bigger sizes at much lower prices. So I don't think the yield is an issue or they'd be affected even more.

I personally run a 1080p projector and it's working great for me. I'm also keeping my display costs under 1k which is pretty nifty. I do understand we've got folks from all walks of life here but 4.5k for a display alone is a pretty ridiculous opportunity cost until you've literally got so much money that you don't care anymore.

150 dpi definitely feels sufficient to me.

And honestly I prefer grayscale even on 90 dpi monitors sometimes.

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