Random thought on 1080+P

some random thought I had while sitting on a bench at a rainy park today….

I finally watched James Cameron's Avatar the other day on DVD. It was a good movie, but the DVD quality was not that great on my 1080p display. It's after all 480P right? Now people are used to 1080P, so DVD quality wouldn't cut it. (even youtube video looks better than DVD, jesus!)

So then what's next? will we need anything over 1080p? I believe the common belief was that our eyes can't process more than a few million pixels so going over 1080p would be waste.(1080P is about 2 million pixels) But apparently we can perceive way more than that…. So we will need more than 1080P.

But one day TV resolutions will overcome our eyes' capabilitiesright? Then can we stop adding more pixels on the TV? I don't think our eyes are the limit.. the manufacturing cost would be the deciding factor.. Say our eyes can only process 1,000 million pixels. But if we are given a TV with 4,000 million pixels, our eyes will see 4 pixels as one pixel. right? So it would be same as blending those 4 pixels into 1. Oh sweet! it's a 4X super sampling antialiasing! If it's gets 16,000 million pixels it's 16x SSAA.. I can't say no to this.. :)

But as I said, it might become too expensive to add that many pixels one day… but price of LEDs are going down everyday and smart people are making LEDs use less power. so that might not be a problem…. or it might become physically impossible to add more pixels one day? just like how we coudln't make single-core CPUs faster anymore? Maybe…. but still 576 Million pixels are long way to go….