PPI (Pixels Per Inch)

Your flat-screen, if you look closely, is actually a Matisse painting. It was made with millions of tiny pixel lights, or optics-carrying fibers that light up, change color and intensity, and can go dark quickly, all as controlled digitally behind the scenes. The density of those lights is its PPI, or pixels per inch, and the industry began with just a few hundred. As technology evolved to create thinner thread-ends of fiber, and create better heat dissipation fans and cooling systems, along with better management of power under the hood, the PPI grew dramatically. Today, we have some 4,000 PPI, with very tight controls and run times, now in the multi-thousands of hours before the flatscreens begin to "pit," or have pixels die and go to pixel heaven, leaving a little block dot on the screen, never to see the light of a high-def ESPN tennis broadcast again.

The same thing happened with digital cameras, whose early renditions were foreshadows of the vastly superior film rendering of an image. But then cameras grew denser pixel-equivialent light management, and today a 16-gig camera is actually denser than film. There's a reason Kodak is pretty much bankrupt.