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.
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.