Not really -- because there are various kinds of interferences 
(including moire patterns, being able to see the pixels (in part 
because you can't do the Nyquist low pass filter on a discrete 
display), etc.). The pixels/inch needs to be above a magic threshold 
(which also varies with the contrast ratio, the exact placement of 
the pixels, etc.) in order to not see aliasing artifacts.

Cheers,

Alan

At 1:49 PM +0100 2/27/01, G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl wrote:
>Can't you solve the problem by creating an overview window in a lower
>resolution and a zoom-window that can freely wander around on the big
>screen?
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Alan Kay [mailto:Alan.Kay at disney.com]
>Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2001 1:16 PM
>To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
>Subject: Re: Project layout
>
>
>Right you are. Lot's of pixels are nice to have, and so is a
>phyically big display.
>
>Here we were talking about the minimal criterial to do scaling, pdf,
>readable fonts, etc., and here the pitch plus a few other things is
>what matters in order not to see artifacts. A display that would be
>the equivalent of two facing 10" high pages would indeed be about 4M
>pixels which is the count that Lex mentioned. But most paper notepads
>or xeroxed papers are 8.5*11 with not all the boundary pixels used,
>so my calculation covers this physical size.
>
>BTW, in the late sixties we were able to compute pretty accurately
>that the proposed  Dynabook (which was about 9*12), which employed
>its lower quarter with a low travel keyboard and had a squarish
>display, needed about 1M pixels in order to simulate paper well
>enough for readability, drawing, and capacity.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Alan
>
>------
>
>At 5:31 AM -0500 2/27/01, JArchibald at aol.com wrote:
>>=> 2/26/01 10:51:03 PM EST, Alan.Kay at disney.com =>
>><< Actually, a pitch of about 150/inch and using some color selection
>>trickery will do the job pretty darn well. So a pretty nice display would
>be
>>about 1.9 million pixels (8" * 10.5"). >>
>>
>>According to my multiplier, this is a screen resolution of 1575x1200 pixels
>>-- a substantial information content. This is pretty good on all but the
>very
>>largest of screens available today (which needless to say, are quite a bit
>>bigger than 8" x 10.5").
>>
>>Jerry.
>>____________________________
>>
>>Jerry L. Archibald
>>systemObjectivesIncorporated
>>____________________________