What is a Pixel?
You see different kinds of digital screens everyday whether it’s your phone, computer, or TV. You are even looking at one right now. You are seeing a lot of pixels, like A LOT, but have you had second thoughts about pixels? Such as…
What are pixels?
How do they work?
How small are they?
So many questions to be asked about pixels. Let’s break it down!
Pixel(Pic-El) = Picture + element
Pixels are the smallest picture elements to display images, you can think of them as bunch of small tiny little squares!
I’m sure you’ve seen something like these.
Resolution: 1280 x 720, 750 x 1334, and 3840 x 2160
Display resolution tells you how many pixels are on the screen and in what ratio they are gridded in.
For example, iPhone 11 has display resolution of 1792 x 828, this means it has 1,483,776 pixels! DAMN that’s a lot of pixels.
Red Green Blue
A pixel is simply a square box. But it can do so much more.
Each pixel has three component colors Red, Green, and Blue.
Each component color has range of 0 to 255 in the shade.
If you thought Grey had so many shades, you were wrong. Each pixel’s component has 266 shades and there are three of them!
Combination of shades and different colors make each pixel to have 16,777,216 different colors!
Side Note: each color component of a pixel needs a transistor to be built with. Can you imagine how many transistors are in your phone?
How small is a Pixel
Now you know how many there are and how many faces each of them can have. But Exactly how small are they?
The size of pixels vary. As the technology develops, pixels become smaller and smaller. The size of pixels can be measured with their pixel density unit PPI or DPI.
PPI: Pixels per inch & DPI: Dots per inch
Let’s go back to out iPhone 11 example.
iPhone 11 has 326 PPI. In the box of 1in x 1in there is 326px 326px.
This makes each pixel on iPhone 11 approximately 0.00301in x 0.00301in.
It’s so small to the point if this pixel was a sand it would be just a step before being defined as silt. It’s SO DAMN TINY
Disclaimer: Not sponsored by Apple (I’d like it to be though)
This old old monitor you may have seen or worked with has 96 PPI.
WOW This makes me appreciate how tiny pixels are now days.
Maybe one day pixels will be so small that pictures are higher quality than real life images!