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a higher resolution photo always provides you with some benefit, as you can continually zoom in on certain parts of the image and still have exceptional clarity.

Maybe, but resolution doesn't mean shite if the photos have poor color reproduction or camera has a small sensor and needs to shoot at a ridiculously high iso in low light, producing an extremely noisy photo. Zooming in on grainy garbage isn't really a benefit. I'd rather a 1.2MP photo of exceptional quality vs. a 16MP photo taken on a potato cam.

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for smartphones, though, what's the limit? 1080p? 1440p? as a tangent, i'm really interested in seeing where smartphones go from here in terms of displays - for years, it's always been about resolution.

I can say that using my Nexus 6, which has a beautiful 1440P screen, would probably be just as good at 1080P. The one benefit of high-resolution screens on smart phones is the ability to zoom in on images and text for finer detail. For normal video viewing and regular use, pixel density on phones has reached a point well beyond distinguishable resolution.

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i think 1440p is going to be the limit on smartphones for the next 6+ years.

Definitely not. We will see 4K phones in less than half that time.

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most people will automatically assume that a 1440p screen is better than a 1080p screen. yet, almost no one automatically assumes that a 13 MP camera is better than an 8 MP camera.

Just a case of misinformation. Those same people probably buy 50" 4K TVs and sit 10 feet away from them watching 1080i broadcast TV and swear it's more detailed.

The screen quality on today's flagship phones are all pretty great. Presented with half a dozen phone screens, without knowing the model and without zooming, your judgment of which was better would be solely based on color accuracy/saturation and contrast. And even then it would more than likely be a subjective view that not everyone would agree with. But while screen quality of flagship phones has nearly converged, camera quality is still all over the map.

This post was edited on 12/6/14 at 6:21 pm