Back in The Day, they had some nice quality dot-matrix printers. They were pretty nice, much more flexible than my parents' letter-quality daisy wheel printer. You could print out cool banners with Print Shop! You could even play music on them. I'd guess they were about the same resolution as the iPad1. I don't remember anybody complaining about being able to see the pixels.
When 300 dpi laser printers arrived, nobody looked back. You could almost imagine that your school reports were typeset. It looked so professional! (If only the writing had been professional...) With 300 dpi iPad's you can almost imagine you're reading a book. People who are visual will care about this. I can see the subpixel coloring on my 20" monitor. If I turn it off, my antialiased text still has blurry vertical lines. It drives me nuts!
Or maybe the best example (again, back in The Day) was when my friend got his 32-bit Nintendo. He demoed a game and I said, "meh, it doesn't really seem all that better." Then he brought out Super Mario 3 on the 8-bit Nintendo and wow, was it painful.
I'm assuming prewett meant 16 bit, which would be the SNES. The only comparison I've seen people make between the N64/Gamecube and NES/SNES is that sprite-based games aged better than early 3D games.
He might be talking about the N64 (which IIRC most games used the set of 32-bit instructions because they were faster and "accurate enough" at the time. - Not sure, though.)
When 300 dpi laser printers arrived, nobody looked back. You could almost imagine that your school reports were typeset. It looked so professional! (If only the writing had been professional...) With 300 dpi iPad's you can almost imagine you're reading a book. People who are visual will care about this. I can see the subpixel coloring on my 20" monitor. If I turn it off, my antialiased text still has blurry vertical lines. It drives me nuts!
Or maybe the best example (again, back in The Day) was when my friend got his 32-bit Nintendo. He demoed a game and I said, "meh, it doesn't really seem all that better." Then he brought out Super Mario 3 on the 8-bit Nintendo and wow, was it painful.