The problem with all these ‘you can’t see it’ and ‘retina’ type of reviews is that they go on theory and forget that people can actually tell the difference, at least when it is pointed out. While 300dpi printing is better than ‘retina’, 600dpi printed text looks so much smoother.
We essentially have two sets of vision perception:
a. A hi-res greyscale.
b. Lower res colour.
Somehow, in the integration going on in our eyes and brains, we ‘see’ it as hi-res colour. Just another part of the digital illusion going on inside us, like with the multi-filter/PCM digital processing going on with our hearing.
We can see the difference 4K makes, but it highly depends upon what we are looking at. Anything with sharp edges, like text and line drawings is obviously smoother when it can be rendered into more pixels, as the smoothing algorithms have more pixels into which to put mid-colours to visually change edges to look smoother.
Unfortunately, PC programs, while often using scaling font technology, like true-type fonts, still render into absolute pixel spaces, which is why everything shrinks down when using smaller hi-res displays.
When using smaller hi-res displays for PCs, if the text is too small to read, then only scaling the display will improve the readability. It does mean that one is ending up with lower effective resolution than if one could read with the native display resolution.
However, this is what we have basically been paying so much extra for top-end phones. You might have noticed that phone prices are largely defined by the resolution, all other facilities being the same, but small text looks so much better on hi-res ones.
I looked at one of the new 8K Samsung TVs the other day, and even right up close, I could not discern individual pixels on a 85" display. With that pixel density approaching that of phones, all text would have excellent readability when scaled to match text sizes with lower-res TVs, so Cubase and all plugin screens would be eminently readable and look fantastic.
While we may be able stretch our budgets for a top-of-the-line phone, TV/monitors with similar pixel densities are rightly expensive, and we generally don’t seem to want to give them the same priority for lavish spending as we do for phones.