So, how much benefit do you get from a 4k screen? That depends on how far away you are from the screen. If you put that many pixels in a 5.7" display, you can view it at roughly the tip of your nose and you won;t be able to see any pixels. In fact, with just the resolution alone, at those dimensions, it would look better than going to the theater. Thats because we perceive detail as contrast. So, resolution can directly provide that contrast, with two adjacent pixels with different colors, and luminosity can provide that contrast.
Both of these together will increase the quality of your viewing experience, no matter if they up the number of colors or change the color gamut used.
But what about a laptop monitor. To get the same density of pixel, on say a 17" monitor, you could sit as close as 13", and not see a hint of pixels. On a 15" monitor, you can sit 12" away. On a 13" monitor, you can sit 10" away.
Wait, nobody sits that close to a monitor, do they? (I ask as I hover 12" over my 2011 Macbook Pro non-retina display.)
What about Desktop displays? On a 23", you need to sit 18" away. On a 27" monitor, you need to be sitting 21" away. Wait, aren’t these numbers getting bigger? I don’t know of any artist that sits 21" away from his monitor, an they usually have 30-32" monitors, if they can afford to.
Then we get into tv size displays. On a 40" display, you need to be 31" away from the monitor to even get to the same quality experience. I have read of several people using 40" 4k monitors to replace 4 1080p displays. They aren’t sitting that far back.
So, what about the critics that say that you have to have incredible eyes to see pixels at those distances? Well, these figures are usually calculated at normal vision, they claim, and most people have less than that, not to mention all those people that have bad enough eyesight to need glasses.
There is some truth to this, as not everyone can see pixels at those distances. But lets look at all of those that need glasses. We need glasses because our vision naturally is not 20/20. So we get those glasses. And it corrects our vision. But for more than hot of us, it doesn’t correct our vision to 20/20, it corrects our vision to be better, sometimes by a large margin, than 20/20 vision. Yes, having glasses can be a super power.
And if you can’t see the pixel on the better display, then no problem, it is still a better display, because its higher resolution is still contributing to the image quality.
Now, this all affects performance, obviously, in a way that just the dynamic range doesn’t really.
Next I will talk about color gamut.