Moving to 4k screens (200+ dpi) is the biggest upgrade you can do for text readability, and I suggest anyone who hasn't tried to do so and see for themselves.
I recently had the opportunity to switch both laptop & desktop screen to 4k to avoid hidpi switching issues and I'm glad I did. While the laptop's battery definitely suffers, this is such a massive upgrade for your eyes it's completely worth it.
Hinting and AA is still relevant though. I suspect this is still going to be the case until we _exceed_ 300 dpi. As you say, the difference is that now freetype's autohinter is good enough to substitute all hand-hinting, as is grayscale AA removing subpixel rendering issues.
Most of the other text shaping issues mentioned in the article are still a problem though. Text rendering is hard. On top of that, both Chrome and Firefox's text engine are also especially bad at rendering text on a physical pixel grid, which is quite ironic given "text" should be the first and foremost thing they present. FF was quite decent until the webrender switch. Pretty sad.
Moving to 4k screens (200+ dpi) is the biggest upgrade you can do for text readability, and I suggest anyone who hasn't tried to do so and see for themselves.
I recently had the opportunity to switch both laptop & desktop screen to 4k to avoid hidpi switching issues and I'm glad I did. While the laptop's battery definitely suffers, this is such a massive upgrade for your eyes it's completely worth it.
Hinting and AA is still relevant though. I suspect this is still going to be the case until we _exceed_ 300 dpi. As you say, the difference is that now freetype's autohinter is good enough to substitute all hand-hinting, as is grayscale AA removing subpixel rendering issues.
Most of the other text shaping issues mentioned in the article are still a problem though. Text rendering is hard. On top of that, both Chrome and Firefox's text engine are also especially bad at rendering text on a physical pixel grid, which is quite ironic given "text" should be the first and foremost thing they present. FF was quite decent until the webrender switch. Pretty sad.