PIXELS

PIXEL

 

A pixel, which used to be referred to as a picture element, is the colour unit which appears on a screen such as a computer screen or on a image of a computer. The size of a pixel depends on the resolution of the screen which they are on. The resolution display on screen, if set to the maximum resolution display, the size of the pixel will be the same as or equal to that of the dot pitch size. If the resolution on your screen is anything less than the maximum that it can be, the pixel will end up being larger than the size of the screens dot.
 

A pixels colour is made up of the three different RGB colours on the colour spectrum, these colours are red, green and blue. It can also be made up of the CMYK colour mode which is cyan, magenta, Yellow and Black. Each pixel has a maximum of 3 bytes of data which helps to specify a pixels colour and is used for each of the colour components. A 24-bit colour system uses all three bytes within the colour however many only use just 1 byte which ends up limiting the screen display to only 256 colours, using these colour system helps to increase the intensity of the colour depth and means bits per pixel or bpp. The bpp can go up to 24bpp which is 16777216 colours which is known as true colour.
 

The word pixel is a mixture of pictures and elements which is where picture element originated and was eventually shortened to pixel.



Non-pixelated images look a lot better than pixelated images and helps the images to appear a lot crisper and smoother if they aren't pixelated, the reason for this is because pixelated images show the exact pixels which are involved in making up the image, whereas a non-pixelated image doesn't show the exact pixels and is therefore a much clearer and better image.

A pixel doesn't necessarily have to be squares that make up an image and can be other shapes such as dots or lines. A showcase of different pixel designs are below.


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/ReconstructionsFromPixels.png