My several pairs of glasses include one just for the rigors of computer work. Even then, I can't comfortably view a display at 1,024 x 768 pixel resolution without squinting or craning my head uncomfortably close to the screen. To compensate, I turn the display resolution down to 800 x 600. And I try to use larger typefaces-for instance, I set Microsoft Word to 14 point instead of the default 10. And the research firm expects flat-panel monitors with resolutions as high as 3,200 x 3,200 over the next few years.
Higher resolution enables the viewer to see more on the screen.
Look at a typical Web page, which crams in menus and submenus, logos, pictures, icons, and sometimes ads. For me, viewing it at greater than 800 x 600 results in an assault on my straining eyes. One conference speaker, Scott Anderson, a product manager at Portrait Displays Inc., demonstrated that slides shown at 1,400 x 1,500 or 1,600 x 1,200 resolution made characters on a 15-in. display extremely small and difficult to read. He concludes that the human eye doesn't view spatial resolutions above 22 to 24 line pairs per degree as enhancing image quality. For these reasons, display makers touting the high resolution of their units don't overly impress me.