I have a ThinkPad, and this has been my experience. Sitting next to my Macbook Pro 13" retina, there is not much difference. 14" 16:9 1080p vs. 13" 16:10 1600p. The matte finish + slight diagonal increase closes the gap between the two. Unless you're in your 20s with perfect vision, I doubt the average person could tell a visual difference between the two.
I will also say that at 13", the difference between 16:9 and 16:10 is practically nonexistent. Especially 14" vs 13". I thought this would be a major issue for me. But it's not. On a 27" desktop monitor? Sure, that can make a difference.
Both laptops are 15".
Yep. What's getting lost in this whole discussion over resolution and whether >1080p is necessary is the issue of panel quality. Most laptops have always had absolute shit that is useless for photo editing or color-accurate work. Even at the high end they rarely advertise things like gamut coverage.
I absolutely hate viewing text on my LO-DPI PC vs my 6 year old HD-DPI Macbook Pro or either my 4 year old android smartphone or my 1 year old iPhone or my 7 year old iPad. It's like playing a NES game vs a PS4 Game. Sure some are fun and it's nostalgic but the world as moved on and lo-res is old.
This is exactly what the product people who are building blazing fast, high spec laptops with top-of-the-line circa 2006 displays need to hear.
But support for 1440p on Linux (and as far as I know not just Linux) is crap.
Anyway in my experience having a high quality display is much much much more important then the display resolution (as long as it's at least 1080p).
Sure some wayland implementations do support fractional scaling but only in a way which leads to not so crisp fonts and images (scaling by 2 and then down scaling the pixel output to the given 1.x scaling factor), which defeats the whole point of getting a higher resolution screen.
Sure if your 1440p screen is also size wise bigger this might not matter but then my argument was always about increasing resolution without increasing monitor size. E.g. like a 1440p14" Laptop or similar.
Also a perfect size scaling on a 1440p14" to make the UI be the same size as on a 1080p14" monitor is technically impossible, through there are ways to get solutions which are good enough anyway (but not scaling to exactly the same size but something close by, separately for each font and other elements in a UI).
And while X impl. might work better, lets be honest X is dead. Still used, sure, but dead anyway.
It is
1080p to 4k is such a large difference
Perfect vision is usually understood to be the ability to discern details of about 1/60 of a degree, or 0.29 milliradians. By the arc length formula (s=rθ), we find that the distance needed to precisely align this angle with the level of detail provided by a 1080p screen is about 20 inches.
In other words, if you sit closer than 20 inches away from your screen (perhaps not that unlikely for a laptop), you might be able to discern details beyond the 1080p level. This would only be possible for extremely contrast sensitive small details, like text in a small font size at 1:1 (no DPI scaling).
So... it's a bit complicated, but I suspect 1080p would be good enough for nearly everyone at 13 inches, but move up to 15 inches and I could see many people preferring 1440p.
High DPI screens are able to render text without aliasing, and that makes a significant difference, especially with less-than-perfect eyesight.
What you're saying is true insofar as I had to squint up to a 1080p screen at 13" to actually see the pixels. But everything was slightly blurry, and switching to a "Retina" (1600p iirc) screen fixed that.
Which was the lack of subpixel aliasing: you can make those screens look blurry as well, by turning it back on. But a 1080 without it just looks like it has janky text rendering.
An actual 4K screen is unnecessary at 13", imho, but the extra pixels are harmless except in battery life. I do detect a real difference in textual rendering between 170ppi and 227, because it's the difference between leaning on subpixel aliasing and turning it off while still getting good results.
First of all the cone spacing in the fovea is around 31arcsec or about half the arcmin you assume. IMO that is more relevant than the 20/20 vision number because that number is not based on any intrinsic quantisation of the visual system but rather mostly limited by blur which tends to be very much not gausian -> not an ideal low pass filter for most eyes.
Now consider the nyquist shannon sampling theorem that tells us that any signal we want to fully capture needs to be sampled at at least twice the frequency of the highest frequency of interest. So if we want to be able to fully represent any state of our visual system on a display we need at least twice the resolution of our visual system (ignoring for a minute that that assumes an ideal lpf which your eye is not as stated above). so already 4x your 1arcmin resolution number.
But that all quickly becomes rather theoretical when you look at jagged elephant in the room: aliasing and scaling! a lot of what we look at is either rendered with pixel precision being very prone to aliasing at scales that are much much larger than your pixel pitch (see this worst case demonstration https://www.testufo.com/aliasing-visibility) or image or video files that might be displayed at a size that isn't an integer multiple or fraction of its native resolution. scaling just like aliasing causes artifacts that go way beyond the scale of your pixel pitch and one way to mitigate the issue is to just have a very high target resolution to scale too. So yeah I don't thing "can't distinguish individual pixels" is a meaningful threshold and even way beyond that there is still benefit to be had even for those with less than perfect eyesight
Especially with Chinese/Japanese characters, these can sometimes become unreadable on smaller fonts on 1080p.
I have two 14” Thinkpads I switch between which have almost identical setups, but one is 1080p and one is 1440. I’m not buying another 1080p if I can avoid it. And yes I have been tweaking fonts and X11 quite a bit already.
Once you see and appreciate the difference, you can’t unsee it. Anything less is jarring.
Print media figured out three to four decades ago that print buyers prefer at least 144 lpi for black shapes, at least 300-600 dpi for grey images, and minimally 300 dpi but ideally 1200 dpi for colour photos people will consider high quality. (Note: For reader convenience I’m mixing lines per inch or lpi with dots per inch or dpi here, lines is per screen but there may be several screens per image, so dpi is the source material you’re trying to reproduce with screens.)
We’ve been settling on computer screen quality for too long. If all we did was video, fine, but we spend most time simulating print.
http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/4k-1080p-201311153442.htm
https://carltonbale.com/does-4k-resolution-matter/comment-pa...
https://www.slashcam.com/news/single/4K-vs-8K--Who-can-tell-...
The biggest thing keeping me on my Macbook is it's hard to find a 13 inch, hi dpi, close as possible to mac keyboard laptop. The Razer 13 inch was sooo close but they made tilde and backslash half keys for some reason....
https://www.ultrabookreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/k...
I guess that could just be my sight, but the reviews for the XPS laptop vs the 4k model of the same were pretty much unanimous on the 4k variant being a waste of battery for a neglible return on image quality, so it's at least not a fringe view