On Sun, 19 Feb 2017 21:54:48 +0000, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

In message , Wolf K
writes:
On 2017-02-18 19:54, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
[...]
It seems obvious to me that there must be some angle below which the
density of rods and cones in the eye becomes the limiting factor.
[...]

Nope, it's your brain. People see what they pay attention to. If the
[]
No, it's not. I'm perfectly aware of all the psychological arguments
concerning optical matters, and most of them have some validity;
however, I can see no way in which putting more pixels in a display than
the eye can resolve can truly make any difference.

I'll turn it back on you: _knowing_ that the display is HD (or at least
720) might make you _think_ it looks better (-:. In much the same way
that wifi manufacturers succeed in selling ever-faster wifi, despite the
fact that in most cases the external link is the (main!) limiting
factor.

I believe you are correct. Your eyes can play "tricks" but only
if you are unaware of what you are looking at. Most people that
are watching a movie are looking at the movie and not counting
pixels or looking for artifacts.

This discussion reminds me when I owned a consumer electronics
repair shop/store. You know, TV's, VCR's, etc. I had a guy that
specialized in car audio and did excellent custom installations.
That attracted a lot of audiophiles who would get into arguments
with each other about which power amp sounded better. One would
say, "The Alpine amp sounds better. It has .ooo5% distortion."
Another would say, "No the Pioneer sounds better. It has .0004%
distortion. I can really hear the difference." I would just
quietly laugh. Their ignorance helped pay my bills. In reality
distortion has to reach close to 3% before the average human ear
can detect it. Plus the human ear is not linear. It adds a
little distortion itself so we never hear anything that is
100% distortion free.

The same sort of thing is true for our eyes. If you go back to
the old method of determining video resolution that was called
"lines of resolution", you would see there is a point where
any improvement is useless. Your eyes won't see it.

--
Wildman GNU/Linux user #557453
The cow died so I don't need your bull!