According to TV Pictures Will Keep Getting Better as Pixels Multiply, Web Advances, we’re within a few years of having televisions indistinguishable from reality:
International Business Machines makes a 22-inch display with nine million pixels — or 10 times the number in a current high-definition TV set. It’s a specialized device for the engineering market, and it costs $6,000. That’s a lot of money, for sure, but it’s also a bargain compared with the $300,000 that the Lawrence Livermore Lab paid for the first model a few years back as an inducement to IBM to build the thing.Mr. Bardsley says that for a 50-inch screen viewed from five feet away, nine million pixels are enough to fool the human eye. Any higher resolution would be overkill, he says, because the eye wouldn’t be able to discern the extra information.
But besides ultrahigh resolution, the perfect display would also need to have twice the possible range of colors that today’s sets have; contrast would need to be improved as well. And, of course, there would need to be a commensurate improvement in the cameras that take the pictures.
Of course, it’s a perfectly realistic two-dimensional image we’re discussing.