About 15 cm view distance for smartphones is pretty normal for me (shortsighted with glasses) on websites where the text is very small, e.g. Hacker News.
I remember those numbers being a third that 20 years ago. Either we have evolved brand new eyes without noticing or you are just talking about the current state of the art like it's the limit of human vision.
Put another way look at 300ppi prints and 1200ppi prints. The difference is night and day at 30 cm viewing.
Higher ppi on mobile is still useful if it enables “manual zoom” (i.e. move your head closer). I do this with Google Sheets on mobile all the time, as I like to have a lot of the sheet displayed at once to see the overall structure, and then peer closer to read the text.
You want to say "the minimum that is useful", because you want a resolution at least equal with that, to not see the pixel structure.
A 27" monitor has a height around 17", i.e. about 43 cm, and for watching a movie or anything else where you look at the screen as a whole the recommended viewing distance is twice the screen height, i.e. about 86 cm.
At this distance, the resolution needed to match the human vision is provided by a height of slightly less than 3000 pixels by this study, but by about 3300 pixels by older studies. In these conditions you are right, the minimum acceptable resolution is around 200 ppi.
This means that a 27 inch 5k monitor, with a resolution of 2880 by 5120 pixels, when viewed from a distance twice its height, i.e. about 86 cm (34 inch), provides a resolution close, but slightly less than that of typical human vision. (That viewing distance that is double the height corresponds to the viewing angle of camera lenses with normal focal length, which has been based on studies about the maximum viewing angles where humans are able to perceive a correct perspective when looking at an image as a whole.)
However, when not watching movies, but working with text documents, you normally stay closer to the monitor than that, so even a 5k monitor is not good enough (but an 8k monitor may be enough, so that might be the final monitor resolution, beyond which an increase is useless).
One would expect the results to be highly correlated to corrected vision which is all over the place.. but they get suspiciously tightly grouped results.
Did they maybe not measure how many pixels we can see.. but rather how laughably bad COTS IPS are at contrast, as the examined pattern approaches their resolution? I wonder what happens if you repeat that with a reasonably bright 16K OLED.
Some people still say that 1080p is plenty, whether for reading text or watching videos (including gaming), but anyone who has used a 4K monitor knows that text looks far clearer and games look far more realistic and detailed at 4K. And the same will probably be true when 4K becomes truly mainstream on desktops.
I would argue that color accuracy is under valued.
Having a high resolution monitor is great, its even become semi affordable. But color accuracy can be a pain point.
This dosnt matter if your just coding, unless you really care how realistic that code looks....but to anyone doing video or photo manipulation or front end design it can be a deal breaker.
This is again showing with distance for TV viewing, we can see difference above 4K but barely touches 8K. Hence that is why I have been saying for close to 10 years now we should have settle on 6K with HDR as default.
It seems after the failure of 3D and 8K the industry doesn't seems to care about anything anymore.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 43.5 ms ] threadFor example:
- 40 cm view distance (e.g. smartphone): 300 ppi is roughly the maximum that's useful
- 100 cm (e.g. desktop monitor): about 200 ppi
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64679-2/figures/2
Put another way look at 300ppi prints and 1200ppi prints. The difference is night and day at 30 cm viewing.
A 27" monitor has a height around 17", i.e. about 43 cm, and for watching a movie or anything else where you look at the screen as a whole the recommended viewing distance is twice the screen height, i.e. about 86 cm.
At this distance, the resolution needed to match the human vision is provided by a height of slightly less than 3000 pixels by this study, but by about 3300 pixels by older studies. In these conditions you are right, the minimum acceptable resolution is around 200 ppi.
This means that a 27 inch 5k monitor, with a resolution of 2880 by 5120 pixels, when viewed from a distance twice its height, i.e. about 86 cm (34 inch), provides a resolution close, but slightly less than that of typical human vision. (That viewing distance that is double the height corresponds to the viewing angle of camera lenses with normal focal length, which has been based on studies about the maximum viewing angles where humans are able to perceive a correct perspective when looking at an image as a whole.)
However, when not watching movies, but working with text documents, you normally stay closer to the monitor than that, so even a 5k monitor is not good enough (but an 8k monitor may be enough, so that might be the final monitor resolution, beyond which an increase is useless).
Did they maybe not measure how many pixels we can see.. but rather how laughably bad COTS IPS are at contrast, as the examined pattern approaches their resolution? I wonder what happens if you repeat that with a reasonably bright 16K OLED.
Having a high resolution monitor is great, its even become semi affordable. But color accuracy can be a pain point.
This dosnt matter if your just coding, unless you really care how realistic that code looks....but to anyone doing video or photo manipulation or front end design it can be a deal breaker.
It seems after the failure of 3D and 8K the industry doesn't seems to care about anything anymore.
It also includes a useful Resolution limit matrix table for common resolutions/screen sizes