[at-fates-hands]

Serious question here. At what point is the human eye unable to tell the difference between such high res displays?

I'm thinking in the same terms I used to think when I was doing home audio. My boss had a set of $10K speakers. Sure, they sounded great, but then I listened to a clients $5k speakers and couldn't tell the difference between his and my bosses speakers. It was as if my ears weren't finely tuned enough to tell.

Of course if you ask my Boss about the difference, he'd take an hour to tell all the differences. To me, the lay person at the time, I couldn't tell.

[skizm]

http://i.imgur.com/xiW4vdw.png

[ninkendo]

That chart should really be zoomed to about 1/5 its size... it goes up to 150 inch? Who has displays that big?

The X axis should go from 10 to 60, the Y axis should go from 1ft to 30ft, max.

As it is, it's not all that useful for figuring out what the density limits of a desktop monitor are. (Average desktop monitor sizes occupy maybe 1/12 of the X axis!)

[davidcuddeback]

The chart wasn't made for desktop monitors. It was made for TVs. It's from this article: http://www.cnet.com/news/why-ultra-hd-4k-tvs-are-still-stupi...

[Shivetya]

Well with a 4K display your able to sit closer to larger ones because you will not detect the pixels as easier. I know many people think you want more distance with a larger set, but with 4Ks they are just fine, as long as don't move your eyes to much to see the entire screen.

[sampo]

That is a very nice chart.

But gee, one length (viewing distance) is in different units than the other length (screen diagonal size). Hilarious.

[chipotle_coyote]

I'm not entirely sure I follow why you feel this is significant. At least in the US, we tend to measure viewing distance in feet and diagonal screen size in inches, and those are both measures of length. It's not like the two axes are "feet" and "fluid ounces."

[antimagic]

Even if it was fluid ounces, that's still not a problem - A line chart of my account balance would have Euros on the y-axis and months on the x-axis. It's still a meaningful chart though...

[thenmar]

What does "full benefits" mean?

[wiremine]

Here's the full article: http://carltonbale.com/1080p-does-matter/

It doesn't really say, but I would guess it has to do with when you start to see individual pixels.

[thenmar]

Thanks!

[kayoone]

For a normal viewing distance when using a desktop PC 4k on 24" or 5K on 27" is pretty much the sweet spot and i am pretty sure Apple won't go above that anytime soon because the benefits are diminishing.

[joefkelley]

A typical generous estimate of human visual acuity is 0.3 arcminutes. As in, any pixel density beyond that is probably not visible to us. It's not an exact measurement since there's disagreement over how to properly measure it. But regardless, most estimates are in the 0.3-0.4 range.

Then simple trig tells us that we are maxed out when:

(distance to screen) * sin(0.3 arcminutes) = pixel size

The new iMac has a 27 inch diagonal, and 5874 pixel diagonal, so its pixel size is 0.004596 inches. Plug that in above, and you can see that you would have to be 53 inches from the screen to be maxing out your visual abilities. Anything closer (like normal) and you actually could still benefit from higher resolution.

[thrownaway2424]

Depends on how far away the monitor is.