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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else feel like your kids are going to not believe that this sort of thing had to be done as they grow up only with fine dot-pitch screens?

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I doubt the need for font hinting will go away any time soon. Most monitors are still roughly 96 dpi (same as mentioned in this article). Apple's retina display might be in the area where hinting doesn't matter as much. However, reaching 300 DPI for a largish computer monitor is really outside the realm possibility today for anything but a completely custom design. For a 30" 16:10 screen you'd need a resolution of ~7575 x 4750. You'd be seriously hard pressed to come up with a graphic card / cabling solution to handle that resolution.

Indeed. Also, 7575 x 4750 x 24bpp = ~96MB RGB framebuffer.

Additionally:

DPI of my 2011 laptop: 115dpi.

DPI of my 2011 monitor: 100dpi.

DPI of my 1997 monitor: 90dpi (100dpi possible at a rather ugly 60Hz)

DPI of my 1993 monitor: 91dpi

With this progress (or lack of) in mind, I think the pixel will be around for a while yet. Indeed, (thanks to LCDs) outside a few small-scale high-DPI places, pixels are more obviously visible than ever before! So why people are so sure that the pixel grid can just be ignored, I'll never know...

> With this progress (or lack of) in mind

IBM once produced 204dpi desktop screens (T220/T221, 3840×2400 in 22.2")

I don't think the spatial resolution of the LCD panel matters quite as much as the angular resolution relative to your eye. If your monitor is further away, you can get away with lower resolutions without being able to see individual pixels.

DisplayPort currently supports the data rates necessary for 300dpi displays up to about 16-17", and 200dpi 24" displays. That's already good enough to toss out almost all font hinting, without any advances needed in graphics cards or cables.

AMD's high-end GPUs can handle 6 monitors each running at 2560x1600, and can render 3d content at that resolution with useful performance.

Where are these monitors, that mean font hinting can be tossed aside? You'd think 300dpi screens were absolutely everywhere, and that only people still using 100dpi monstrosities were dinosaurs, sticks-in-the-mud, and your technophobic grandmother - all easily ignored! But that appears to be not the case. The majority of screens (probably all of them, pretty much, going by surface area...) seem to still be at the 100-150dpi resolution. Worse, the higher-DPI screens are on things like laptops, phones and tablets - all devices that have a limit on how far away from your eyes you can hold them! End result: grid still very much in evidence.

People are so keen to do away with the very idea of the pixel grid, and just pretend it doesn't exist, but the technology to display the result is just not there yet! Are we going to have to put up with even more years of blurry fonts and coloured fringes, just so that people can pretend the future is here, when it blatantly is not?

> DisplayPort currently supports the data rates necessary for 300dpi displays

The problem isn't (and has not been in quite a long time) the content of the computer box, it's OS support for high-DPI screens and the price of screen hardware (IBM used to sell 204 dpi computer screens, 22.2" with a 3840×2400 resolution, you had to feed it with 4 DVI channels but it worked — for 2D anyway, the first generation shipped with a quad-gpu Matrox G200 MMS)

It's already gone away.

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