I had a curious thought today while at work.
Do the current trends in technology give any indication that one day video display resolution at the scale of the Planck Length may be achievable? Is this idea even conceivable in any sort of realistic way?
Assuming I have understood the question, it is a strange one, since:
Resolution is not normally given as a pixel size: it’s normally just a number of pixels and then possibly some measurement of pixels per unit area. Because it depends what kind of screen it is and how it will be viewed.
If I move a projector closer to a wall, I make the pixels smaller but it doesn’t mean the image is necessarily any better.
More importantly, the limit for resolution is human vision. Arguably we have already crossed the point where further increases in resolution would be imperceptible to humans. Certainly long before you get to the limit of physics.
Further improvements will be in areas like 3D or contrast ratio.
Yep.
Apart from it being unnecessary since 4K already exceeds human visual resolution unless you watch the screen a few inches away through a magnifying glass, each pixel requires a certain amount of circuitry near it. That is, each pixel can’t just be one elementary particle, it needs some kind of mechanism to make it change color and a connection to a controller that tells it when to change. What could this circuitry consist of if the pixel is already at Planck scale? In fact, even if the pixel were trillions of times larger, say the size of a proton, the same problem would exist.
Sorta. It’s true that standard displays at standard viewing lengths are pretty much as good as necessary at 4k, but increasing pixel density is still a concern in some areas, notably in VR/AR headset displays and in compact projectors.
But the point is valid that trying to make pixels shrink has definite diminishing returns.
I disagree: it’s a qualitative improvement. You may not be able to detect a pixel-by-pixel difference but you can tell that the picture looks better. The obvious example - to me - is this monitor I’m using right now. It’s a 24" 4k monitor. The normal resolutions for that size display are 1080p and 1200p. But with a 4k display the text looks much better. Curves are more curved, lines can be finer, etc.
If you have a laser printer, here’s another one: print out the same text at 75 dpi, 150 dpi, 300 dpi, 400 dpi, 600 dpi, and 1200 dpi (depending upon what your printer can do). Note that with 75 dpi and 150 dpi you can see the dots whereas with 300 dpi you likely won’t and with higher dpi you won’t and as you increase the dpi the text looks better and better.
(As an aside, I had to deal with a real problem with legal documents caused by this because the kerning used differed according to the print resolution. This caused words and paragraphs to shift around with pages being inconsistent - an absolute no-no with legal documents at the time.)
While the analogy of planck length to resolution of reality is easy to see, obviously I did not truly have a good vision of the scope of the matter
That article puts entirely too much stock in Steve Job’s marketing claims about “retina displays.” There IS a pixel density beyond which the human eye can’t see a difference, but it’s denser than Apple claimed.
1080p to 4k is a perceptible difference, if not overwhelming at usual viewing distances. At CLOSE distances, it’s much more significant.
Beyond 4k for home displays is definitely into the diminishing returns territory.