No matter how I slice it, things look pretty on my 46" 1080p TV than when I see the same thing at 1440p on my 27" monitor. I could say it's because the TV is glossy while the monitor is matte and I do get some envy looking at iMac screens, but maybe it's something else.

So the relationship to monitors and camera sensors as the title suggests is that packing more pixels in a fixed area on camera sensors may actually produce worse image quality than not. The reason being that each pixel receives less light, so it picks up less accurate detail, or sometimes the light spills over and you have fringes of color all over the place (I'm not doing camera sensor physics a favor here). So what if the opposite were true? What if the thing was giving off light? More pixels in a tighter area means tiny "holes" for light to escape out of for a given source. And seeing more light means seeing more clearly.