You can even rotate or stretch the images. In vector layout applications, you often place images at different resolutions in the same document. Likewise, when working with design for print, a pixel in itself have no meaning in a physical sense. So we live with different meanings of the word "pixel". On the design level, your pixel character can still be said to consist of for example 7×12 pixels even though it might be taking up 28×48 pixels on the screen. But when you display the graphics, you probably scale it up several times. So you design your graphics by coloring a grid of pixels. You might be making pixel art for a game. It depends on how you choose to display them. The pixels don't have a physical size until you assign one to them and they are not necessarily the same as the pixels you see on a monitor. Nothing more than colored squares in a grid. I like the two other answers, but would still like to give an answer seen more from the viewpoint of a graphic designer.)Ī pixel is simply the smallest unit of an image. Our language simply isn't precise enough. (It's clear now that a simple answer to this question doesn't exist. Rafael's answer is the least abstruse, but it still refers to recondite terms like "the bit depth". What does "atomic" mean? I feel I need to know some physics to understand this answer! How small the dots are from an inkjet, a laser printer or an imagesetter determines how much fine detail it can reproduce. How much fine detail a screen can display depends on how close the dots are (what they used to call "dot pitch" in the old CRT days). It can be a dot on a screen, or it can be a dot produced by a printhead. What are "channels" and "bits per channel"?Īn inch (okay, so you know this already - bear with me) is a unit of linear measurement on a surface, which could be a screen or a piece of paper.Ī dot is, well, a dot. Square or not, a pixel is still the smallest unit of a picture. If you do video, you know that pixels don't have to be square - they are non-square in all older video formats. How many channels and bits per channel make up one pixel is the measure of how subtle the information in a pixel may be, but the basic fact is that 1 pixel the smallest increment of information in an image. Pixels may be displayed, or they may be printed, but you can't divide pixels into smaller pieces to get more information. None.Ī pixel (the word was originally coined, iirc, by IBM and derives from "picture element") is the smallest indivisible unit of information in a digital image. There is absolutely zero correlation between pixels and dots. No, each pixel is represented by multiple dots*. It’s actually pretty simple: LCDs are made up of pixels, and pixels are made up of dots. I've read many explanations, but either they all are too abstruse or they gainsay each other.Ī dot refers to ink density, effectively a pixel refers to image density on a screen.Ī quick PSA on "dots" versus "pixels" in LCDs | TechCrunch
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