[Strom]

Definitely interesting. Regarding the human eye, it varies greatly from person to person how well they see. However it's not even only about the eye itself, but also how well suited & trained [1] your brain is to interpreting the signals.

I personally have always had perfect vision, and have always been able to notice even fairly subtle differences in resolution. My brother also has perfect vision in the classic 20/20 sense, but has to inspect closely to tell apart even 720p & 1080p movies. Our ability to notice differences in bitrate is even more far apart. [2] It's not even only about picture quality, but also about refresh rates. I can tell the difference between 100 Hz & 144 Hz, and I'll even notice bad frame pacing on an otherwise stable framerate. At the same time I have a friend who didn't notice anything different about the 48 fps variant of The Hobbit compared to other 24 fps movies.

It probably has a lot to do with what we spend our time doing. In that I've spent most of my life hunting for better picture quality & higher frame rates. Compared to the average person I must've spent an unbelivable amount of time thinking about & observing picture quality & frame rate. Thus I have probably developed a skill for this.

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[1] The training can be an implicit side-effect of other activities.

[2] Interestingly this is for video bitrate. The reverse is true for audio bitrate. My brother being a lifelong audiophile claims to hear the difference between even 320 kbps MP3 & FLAC.