Pixel

In digital imaging, a pixel, pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest addressable element in a dot matrix printer or display device. In most digital display devices, pixels are the smallest element that can be manipulated through software.
Each pixel is a sample of an original image; more samples typically provide more accurate representations of the original. The intensity of each pixel is variable. In color imaging systems, a color is typically represented by three or four component intensities such as red, green, and blue, or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.
In some contexts, pixel refers to a single scalar element of a multi-component representation, while in yet other contexts it may refer to a set of component intensities for a spatial position.
Software on early consumer computers was necessarily rendered at a low resolution, with large pixels visible to the naked eye; graphics made under these limitations may be called pixel art, especially in reference to video games. Modern computers and displays, however, can easily render orders of magnitude more pixels than was previously possible, necessitating the use of large measurements like the megapixel.

Etymology

The word pixel is a combination of pix and el ; similar formations with 'el' include the words voxel, and texel. The word pix appeared in Variety magazine headlines in 1932, as an abbreviation for the word pictures, in reference to movies. By 1938, "pix" was being used in reference to still pictures by photojournalists.
The word "pixel" was first published in 1965 by Frederic C. Billingsley of JPL, to describe the picture elements of scanned images from space probes to the Moon and Mars. Billingsley had learned the word from Keith E. McFarland, at the Link Division of General Precision in Palo Alto, who in turn said he did not know where it originated. McFarland said simply it was "in use at the time".
The concept of a "picture element" dates to the earliest days of television, for example as "Bildpunkt" in the 1888 German patent of Paul Nipkow. According to various etymologies, the earliest publication of the term picture element itself was in Wireless World magazine in 1927, though it had been used earlier in various U.S. patents filed as early as 1911.
Some authors explain pixel as picture cell, as early as 1972. In graphics and in image and video processing, pel is often used instead of pixel. For example, IBM used it in their Technical Reference for the original PC.
Pixilation, spelled with a second i, is an unrelated filmmaking technique that dates to the beginnings of cinema, in which live actors are posed frame by frame and photographed to create stop-motion animation. An archaic British word meaning "possession by spirits ", the term has been used to describe the animation process since the early 1950s; various animators, including Norman McLaren and Grant Munro, are credited with popularizing it.

Technical

thought of as the smallest single component of a digital image. However, the definition is highly context-sensitive. For example, there can be "printed pixels" in a page, or pixels carried by electronic signals, or represented by digital values, or pixels on a display device, or pixels in a digital camera. This list is not exhaustive and, depending on context, synonyms include pel, sample, byte, bit, dot, and spot. Pixels can be used as a unit of measure such as: 2400 pixels per inch, 640 pixels per line, or spaced 10 pixels apart.
The measures "dots per inch" and "pixels per inch" are sometimes used interchangeably, but have distinct meanings, especially for printer devices, where dpi is a measure of the printer's density of dot placement. For example, a high-quality photographic image may be printed with 600 ppi on a 1200 dpi inkjet printer. Even higher dpi numbers, such as the 4800 dpi quoted by printer manufacturers since 2002, do not mean much in terms of achievable resolution.
The more pixels used to represent an image, the closer the result can resemble the original. The number of pixels in an image is sometimes called the resolution, though resolution has a more specific definition. Pixel counts can be expressed as a single number, as in a "three-megapixel" digital camera, which has a nominal three million pixels, or as a pair of numbers, as in a "640 by 480 display", which has 640 pixels from side to side and 480 from top to bottom and therefore has a total number of 640 × 480 = 307,200 pixels, or 0.3 megapixels.
The pixels, or color samples, that form a digitized image may or may not be in one-to-one correspondence with screen pixels, depending on how a computer displays an image. In computing, an image composed of pixels is known as a bitmapped image or a raster image. The word raster originates from television scanning patterns, and has been widely used to describe similar halftone printing and storage techniques.

Sampling patterns

For convenience, pixels are normally arranged in a regular two-dimensional grid. By using this arrangement, many common operations can be implemented by uniformly applying the same operation to each pixel independently. Other arrangements of pixels are possible, with some sampling patterns even changing the shape of each pixel across the image. For this reason, care must be taken when acquiring an image on one device and displaying it on another, or when converting image data from one pixel format to another.
For example:
Image:Wikipedia ClearType.png|thumb|right|upright=1.15|Subpixel text rendering using ClearType

Liquid-crystal displays typically use a staggered grid, where the red, green, and blue components are sampled at slightly different locations. Subpixel rendering is a technology which takes advantage of these differences to improve the rendering of text on LCD screens.
The vast majority of color digital cameras use a Bayer filter, resulting in a regular grid of pixels where the color of each pixel depends on its position on the grid.
A clipmap uses a hierarchical sampling pattern, where the size of the support of each pixel depends on its location within the hierarchy.
Warped grids are used when the underlying geometry is non-planar, such as images of the earth from space.
The use of non-uniform grids is an active research area, attempting to bypass the traditional Nyquist limit.
Pixels on computer monitors are normally "square" ; pixels in other systems are often "rectangular", as are digital video formats with diverse aspect ratios, such as the anamorphic widescreen formats of the Rec. 601 digital video standard.
Resolution of computer monitors

Computer monitors generally have a fixed native resolution. What it is depends on the monitor, and size. See below for historical exceptions.
Computers can use pixels to display an image, often an abstract image that represents a GUI. The resolution of this image is called the display resolution and is determined by the video card of the computer. Flat-panel monitors, e.g. OLED or LCD monitors, or E-ink, also use pixels to display an image, and have a native resolution, and it should be matched to the video card resolution. Each pixel is made up of triads, with the number of these triads determining the native resolution.
On older, historically available, CRT monitors the resolution was possibly adjustable, while on some such monitors the beam sweep rate was fixed, resulting in a fixed native resolution. Most CRT monitors do not have a fixed beam sweep rate, meaning they do not have a native resolution at all – instead they have a set of resolutions that are equally well supported. To produce the sharpest images possible on a flat-panel, e.g. OLED or LCD, the user must ensure the display resolution of the computer matches the native resolution of the monitor.

Resolution of telescopes

The pixel scale used in astronomy is the angular distance between two objects on the sky that fall one pixel apart on the detector. The scale measured in radians is the ratio of the pixel spacing and focal length of the preceding optics,.
Because is usually expressed in units of arcseconds per pixel, because 1 radian equals × 3600 ≈ 206,265 arcseconds, and because focal lengths are often given in millimeters and pixel sizes in micrometers which yields another factor of 1,000, the formula is often quoted as.

Bits per pixel

The number of distinct colors that can be represented by a pixel depends on the number of bits per pixel. A 1 bpp image uses 1 bit for each pixel, so each pixel can be either on or off. Each additional bit doubles the number of colors available, so a 2 bpp image can have 4 colors, and a 3 bpp image can have 8 colors:

1 bpp, 2¹ = 2 colors
2 bpp, 2² = 4 colors
3 bpp, 2³ = 8 colors
4 bpp, 2⁴ = 16 colors
8 bpp, 2⁸ = 256 colors
16 bpp, 2¹⁶ = 65,536 colors
24 bpp, 2²⁴ = 16,777,216 colors

For color depths of 15 or more bits per pixel, the depth is normally the sum of the bits allocated to each of the red, green, and blue components. Highcolor, usually meaning 16 bpp, normally has five bits for red and blue each, and six bits for green, as the human eye is more sensitive to errors in green than in the other two primary colors. For applications involving transparency, the 16 bits may be divided into five bits each of red, green, and blue, with one bit left for transparency. A 24-bit depth allows 8 bits per component. On some systems, 32-bit depth is available: this means that each 24-bit pixel has an extra 8 bits to describe its opacity.

Subpixels

Many display and image-acquisition systems are not capable of displaying or sensing the different color channels at the same site. Therefore, the pixel grid is divided into single-color regions that contribute to the displayed or sensed color when viewed at a distance. In some displays, such as LCD, LED, and plasma displays, these single-color regions are separately addressable elements, which have come to be known as subpixels, mostly RGB colors. For example, LCDs typically divide each pixel vertically into three subpixels. When the square pixel is divided into three subpixels, each subpixel is necessarily rectangular. In display industry terminology, subpixels are often referred to as pixels, as they are the basic addressable elements in a viewpoint of hardware, and hence pixel circuits rather than subpixel circuits is used.
Most digital camera image sensors use single-color sensor regions, for example using the Bayer filter pattern, and in the camera industry these are known as pixels just like in the display industry, not subpixels.
For systems with subpixels, two different approaches can be taken:

The subpixels can be ignored, with full-color pixels being treated as the smallest addressable imaging element; or
The subpixels can be included in rendering calculations, which requires more analysis and processing time, but can produce apparently superior images in some cases.

This latter approach, referred to as subpixel rendering, uses knowledge of pixel geometry to manipulate the three colored subpixels separately, producing an increase in the apparent resolution of color displays. While CRT displays use red-green-blue-masked phosphor areas, dictated by a mesh grid called the shadow mask, it would require a difficult calibration step to be aligned with the displayed pixel raster, and so CRTs do not use subpixel rendering.
The concept of subpixels is related to samples.