Pixels and Image Resolution

Pixel & Image Resolution

A pixel is a very tiny square that uses colour to make a picture on a screen, and it is short for 'Picture Element'. The amount of pixels on the screen determines how clear and detailed the image is.

Earlier systems, such as game consoles in the 80's, could not get a higher resolution 128x64 because of the limits of the technology in those days.

More recent systems can achieve much greater resolutions, e.g. PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 can go up to 1920x1080 (Full HD).

RGB Colour scale.

A pixel's colour on a screen is determined by RGB Colour, which is Red, Green & Blue. Each of these 3 colours has a scale ranging from 0-255. And using this scale, each pixel has a different colour using a combination of these colour's gradients.

Each pixel is given specific co-ordinates which do not change, the only thing that changes is the RGB colour 'code'. To get a very smooth game/video, these pixel 'codes' have to be updated 60 times per seconds.


Image resolution comes in lots of different sizes, which include (but not restricted to):

 

• 420x360
• 800x600
• 1080x720 (HD Ready)
• 1920x1080 (Full HD)

If you multiply the two numbers together, that is approximately the number of pixels there are on the screen. The higher the resolution of the image, the more pixels it has and therefore the more detailed it can be.


Example:

The Full HD resolutions are 1920x1080. When multiplied this equals to 2,073,600. This can also be reffered to as 2 Mega-Pixels (rounded), because 1,000,000 pixels is 1 mega-pixel.

Where-as

8K Resolution is 7680x4320, which equals to 33,177,600 pixels on the screen. This is also called 33.2 Mega-pixels (rounded).