[electrograv]

Yes, human visual perception exists along a spectrum of temporal, spatial, and chromatic resolution that varies from person to person — I’ve even met some people who can’t perceive the difference between 30hz and 120hz, while to me and most people I know, the difference between 60hz and 120hz is enormous.

So you could make the same argument against high DPI displays, superior peak screen brightness, enormously better contrast ratio, color gamut, etc. Also speaker quality, keyboard quality, trackpad quality, etc.

Where does this argument end? Do you propose we regress to 60hz 1080p displays with brightness, contrast, and viewing angles that are abysmal by modern standards? Or is the claim that the MacBook Air’s current screen is the perfect “sweet spot” beyond which >99% of people can’t tell the difference?

I think the market data alone disproves this pretty conclusively. Clearly a significant enough percentage of the population cares enough about image quality to vote with their wallets so much so that enormous hardware industries continue to invest billions towards make any incremental progress in advancing the technology here.

To be fair, I think there’s strong data to support that modern “retina”-grade DPI is good enough for >99% of people. And you can argue that XDR/HDR is not applicable/useful for coding or other tasks outside of photo/video viewing/editing (though for the latter it is enormously noticeable and not even remotely approaching human visual limits yet). But there’s plenty of people who find refresh rate differences extremely noticeable (usually up to at least 120hz), and I think almost anyone can easily notice moderate differences in contrast ratio and max brightness in a brightly lit room.

[VincentEvans]

Lol, reminds me of audiophile discussions when most people listen to youtube streaming a recompressed version of an mp3 someone uploaded.

[toxik]

It’s not imagined though, I use my partner’s phone sometimes and every time I used it I thought it was broken because the UI jitter was so jarring at 60Hz. Actually I’m still not convinced her phone isn’t broken. Also her flashlight resets to the lowest brightness EVERY time it’s cycled.

[crazygringo]

> because the UI jitter was so jarring at 60Hz

See this is what confuses me.

If the UI jitter on their phone was "so jarring", it's not because it's 60 Hz. It's because the phone's CPU isn't keeping up.

Like, nobody watches a video filmed at 60 fps and then watches their favorite TV show or a motion picture at 24 fps and says "the jitter was so jarring". And that's at less than half the rate we're even talking about! Similarly, even if you can tell the difference between 60 and 120 Hz, it's not jarring. It's not jittery. It's pretty subtle, honestly. You can notice it if you're paying attention, but you'd never in a million years call it "jarring".

I think a lot of people might be confusing 60 Hz with jittery UX that has nothing to do with the display refresh rate. Just because the display operates at a higher refresh rate doesn't mean the CPU is actually refreshing the interface at that rate. And with certain apps or with whatever happening in the background, it isn't.

[kllrnohj]

> Like, nobody watches a video filmed at 60 fps and then watches their favorite TV show or a motion picture at 24 fps and says "the jitter was so jarring". And that's at less than half the rate we're even talking about!

Those have motion blur.

> Similarly, even if you can tell the difference between 60 and 120 Hz

I don't know why you're phrasing this so oddly doubtful? Being able to tell the difference between 60hz and 120hz is hardly uncommon. It's quite a large difference, and this is quite well studied.

[jbverschoor]

It’s especially noticeable when scrolling, when moving windows, and when moving around the cursor

[klausa]

> If the UI jitter on their phone was "so jarring", it's not because it's 60 Hz. It's because the phone's CPU isn't keeping up.

No, it's not. This isn't about dropped frames or micro-stutters caused by the CPU. It's about _motion clarity_.

You can follow the objects moving around on the screen much better, and the perceived motion is much smoother because there is literally twice the information hitting your eyes.

You can make a simple experiment — just change your current monitor to 30hz and move the mouse around.

Does it _feel_ different? Is the motion less smooth?

It's not because your computer is suddenly struggling to hit half of the frames it was hitting before; it's because you have less _motion information_ hitting your eyes (and the increased input lag; but that's a separate conversation).

60->120fps is less noticeable than 30->60fps; but for many, many people it is absolutely very clearly noticable.

> Like, nobody watches a video filmed at 60 fps and then watches their favorite TV show or a motion picture at 24 fps and says "the jitter was so jarring".

People absolutely complain about jitter in 24fps content on high-end displays with fast response times; it is especially noticeable in slow panning shots.

Google "oled 24fps stutter" to see people complaining about this.

It's literally why motion smoothing exists on TVs.

[Aeolun]

If you switch from 60hz to 30hz you absolutely notice. I wouldn’t think it’s wrong to say it is jarring.

30hz is still perfectly usable, but you constantly feel as if something is off. Like maybe you have a process running in the background eating all your CPU.

I imagine going from 120hz to 60hz is the same thing. It should be theoretically indistinguishable, but it’s noticeable.

[bashwizard]

> It's because the phone's CPU isn't keeping up.

That's bs. You will immediately notice the difference when going from let's say 120 hz down to 60 hz on a fast gaming pc even if you're just dragging windows around. Everything feels jarring to say the least compared to higher refresh rates and it has absolutely nothing to do with the CPU. It's because of the refresh rate.

It's same thing going from 120 hz to 60 hz on a phone while scrolling and swiping.

It's quite interesting though that there are people out there who won't notice the huge difference. But hey, at least they don't have to pay premium for the increase performance of the screen.

[electrograv]

It’s deeply flawed logic at best (or an intentional red herring at worst) to cite the existence of pseudoscience discussed elsewhere, as an argument against real science being discussed here.

There is a well-understood science to both auditory and visual perception, even more concretely so for the visual side. The scientific literature on human perception in both categories is actively used in the engineering of almost every modern (audible/visual) device you use every day (both in hardware design, and software such as the design of lossy compression algorithms). We have very precise scientific understanding of the limits (and individual variation) of human visual and (to a slightly lesser extent) auditory perception and preferences.

[senordevnyc]

It's not about whether people can perceive the difference. They don't care.

[electrograv]

That’s why I specifically emphasized “perception and preferences”. Believe it or not, the science covers both - both what people can perceive, and what people care about and value.

[tomjakubowski]

It continues to amaze me years later how many people happily enjoyed watching 4:3 content stretched to 16:9, before 4:3 mostly disappeared from broadcasts.

[lillecarl]

Black bars?