A typical consumer chart book is about 22 x 17 printed with offset lithography, usually considered to be 144 DPI or better. About 7.7 mega pixels on a page, and at that not a "retina" image as the term is currently used (your eyes can resolve more). A typical chart plotter is 12" diagonal and 80 DPI or 0.39 mega pixels (higher end ones are WXGA and about 1 Mp). Coarsely put then, you can display approximately 5% of the data on a chart plotter compared to a smallish paper chart. As the plotter software developer, you have to be extremely clever to convey the same information, considering the handicap of the display. The chosen strategies revolve around zooming and panning, something your eyes can do around a paper chart in milliseconds, automatically drawn to areas of interest.

The situation has improved with improved zooming and panning speed, and with improved display resolutions. It is technically feasible to install a nice 27" 220 dpi display now, and drive it with enough horsepower to make zooming and panning functionally instantaneous (iMac Retina 27" 5120 x 2880 - 14 Mpixels - costs less than a mid range chart plotter). Daylight readability and waterproofness yet to come. With that kind of display, and vector charts designed to take advantage of it, I think you might say paper is obsolete. But chart plotters are not here yet - maybe 10 years from now they will be.