If you take a high resolution photo of various LCD and eInk devices, say 10MP or higher, then view the photo at full resolution, which means only a small portion of the photo will fit on your monitor, it gives you a stunning magnification of what your eyes are trying to interpolate. (Here is a clue, look at the subtle yet small checkerboard looking background that surrounds this MR web page.) The greater the size of space around the pixels and the darkness of that space both effect how well our eyes can focus on the page and how distracting or how much eyestrain we have to deal with. I can easily see the space between the pixels on my $200 23" computer monitor as I'm typing this post. It looks similar on my iPad, it is less noticeable on my nookcolor, and I do not notice it at all on my iPod touch's 4G Retina display. Considering how monitors looked back in the 1980s when PCs were first becoming affordable, the technology has been greatly improved. I still remember the green text on black screen dislayed by my Apple II+ monitor, and how letters actually had spaces between the horizontal lines! Get up close to your TV and it looks terrible because it was dsigned to be viewed from across the room where the pixels seem to fade into one another rather than individually standing out. If you move your iPad (or any LCD screen) out to arms link it will look much better than it does a foot from your face.

I attached a photo I took of my iPod touch 2G and iPod touch 4G side by side. This was a 18MP photo, so I cropped out a 400 x 600 px section of the same part of each device's screen and show them here in full size. Since the 18MP photo is many times higher than the resolution of your computer monitor (or iPad or other device) this small section of screens looks magnified. (That is because my camera's sensor has several pixels for each pixel in these iPods.) But this represents what your eyes have to interpolate and why some LCDs are much better at preventing eyestrain than others.

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