burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

One more note I'll add... I've seen my own 4K work projected in a motion picture theater on excellent 4K equipment. It lacks nothing in terms of perceived resolution and sharpness. Why? Primarily because of viewing distance. From most seats in the house, the picture is too small. In the front rows, it is too large and hard to view. If I sit in the optimum part of the theater, it is fine.

Sitting in front of my 27" 4K monitor in my office, However, I see a 4K image that is better than I would see in most theaters. It is brighter. It takes up the correct field of view in front of me, at arms' length. I can't see any pixels (monitor dots, either, for that matter). If it looks good here, I know a theater screen will not be a problem.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

The D850 is an extremely capable stills camera. It is hard to imagine replacing it for any reason. In a pinch, it can record decent 4K video. That's not its main strength, but it works well enough.

Lots of folks use the D850 with a 60mm Micro Nikkor and the ES-2 adaptor for digitizing film and slides.

Wallen Loc: Middle Earth

Yes, and that was what I presented. The subjective quality of the image thrown at a certain size and the viewing distance.

We are looking at the same coin from different perspectives.
You were pointing out the projectors pixel count which is correct and I was explaining the effect of that count on the projected image on the wall.
It got confusing because I am calling it a dot since each one is a mixture of colored pixels & illumination that is being painted on a surface.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

The best way to understand pixels vs dots is to consider pixels to be numbers. They are picture elements. Digital cameras contain sensor elements, or sensels — monochrome devices covered with primary color filters. Each sensel converts light into electron voltage.

The output of several (up to 64) of these adjacent sensels is combined using Bayer array processing to create pixels in a file. This processing occurs both in the camera's JPEG computer processor, and on your desktop computer in raw processing software such as Lightroom Classic or Capture One. The sensels are analogous to primary colored dots. But a pixel has *three* color channel values — one red, one green, one blue. The more bits used in each color channel, the more colors can be described.

Everything on the output side reverses this model in some fashion. It takes the values in pixels and translates them into ink dots of various sizes and distributions, or laser spots used to expose three layers of photo paper with a certain color value, or phosphor dots or primary color LEDs in a monitor screen or projector...

Technically what hits the screen in a theater is an array of dots. Dots and sensels have physical dimensions. Pixels are numbers. Dots are used both to create and to represent the pixels in a file. This all got muddy in the marketplace because of the history of the industry.

What matters is that you have enough pixels to reproduce just more detail than the eye can perceive at the viewing distance. If you see either dots, or what look like discrete pixels, there is a deficiency of some sort.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

The best way to understand dots in a pixel-based world is to accept that dots don't exist in a pixel-based world.