Resolution limit of the eye – how many pixels can we see?

jdubb

There's this classic by VSauce about the same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I5Q3UXkGd0

Terr_

I hate the fact that my very first reaction is: "That just got bulldozed."

fainpul

This is helpful for estimating how much higher display resolutions are still perceivable and when we enter the territory of "marketing bullshit".

For 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

noosphr

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.

jl6

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.

trenchpilgrim

I use my phone way closer than 40cm all the time...

dev_hugepages

You may have untreated myopia, or need to use a bigger font size (HN is guilty of this!)

cubefox

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.

samat

I’ve started using text scaling on HN (Cmd++ on Mac, available on mobile, too) and it’s much easier to read and pleasant to the eye this way.

cubefox

Oh, that's a great idea. I see Firefox also has this in the settings under Accessibility. I guess I never looked there because I don't think of myself as disabled. (Maybe I should.)

edelbitter

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.