It might sound counter-intuitive, but less is actually more when it comes to our display screens, writes the famed New York Times tech columnist David Pogue.
"More resolution means bigger, slower downloads," he says. "TV shows and software that haven't been upgraded for the higher resolution actually look worse than they did before."
But that's not all: The math itself doesn't add up. In a tech paper published in 2010, Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate Technologies, refuted Steve Jobs' claim that your eye's resolution can be counted in pixels, saying "The iPhone has significantly lower resolution than the [eye's] retina. It actually needs a resolution significantly higher than the retina in order to deliver an image that appears perfect to the retina."
So what does that mean for the average consumer purchasing a TV? Either she should find a super-small set that's about 84 inches and sit roughly 5.5 feet away from it to tell a difference in the resolution, says Pogue, or she should flat-out ignore it and see the "high-res" revolution for what Soneira said it was: "marketing puffery."
[via Scientific American]
