No sense in reviving old computers

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.

Actually, I think Wolf is onto something there.

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 (-:.

It doesn't work that way because you don't know in advance whether it's
going to be HD or SD. You can't make that determination until you see
it. It's not enough to assume that an HD display will be receiving an HD
signal, or that it won't be receiving a signal that's been upsampled to
HD. Only your eyes/brain can answer that, if you're even looking for it.

For artifacts like banding and macro blocking, when I point them out
during a movie, for example, invariable the person or people around me
give one of the following responses:
"Oh, I never noticed that before. What causes it?"
"I've seen that but didn't know what it was. What did you call it?"
"Yeah, that annoys the heck out of me, too!"

In each of those scenarios, they can see those artifacts just fine. The
only difference is whether they needed a bit of prompting first.

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.

That's not really germane to the current discussion, but I'm happy to
give my take. IMHO, LAN speeds are a completely separate topic from WAN
speeds, and one should almost never artificially constrain oneself to a
LAN that's as slow as the WAN. There are a lot of LAN activities that
have nothing to do with the WAN.

--

Char Jackson