Pixels in Video Games

Pixels in Video Games

A pixel is a single point in a digital graphic image. The word pixel means ‘picture element’ Computers arrange millions of pixels in rows and columns to display images at high resolution. Monitors use pixels that are made of three different coloured dots, red green and blue. They are all located in the exact same point. Some monitors make the coloured pixels look blurry or fuzzy because the monitors can’t converge the three coloured dots.

If the digital image has lots of pixels, then they will flow together and look realistic. If the image doesn’t have a lot of pixels, it will have low resolution and look unrealistic. The quality of the monitor will determine how many pixels can be displayed, meaning how high the resolution will be. Some systems such as ‘True Colour’ use 24 bits per pixel, which lets them use millions of different colours. These systems use 3 bytes to store a pixel’s colour, but most display systems use 1 byte to store a pixel’s colour, which means they can only use 256 different colours.

Intensity

Each pixel is stored in the computer with a pixel value which shows the brightness and colour of the pixel. A bitmap is a file that “indicates a colour for each pixel along the horizontal axis or row (called the x coordinate) and a colour for each pixel along the vertical axis (called the y coordinate).”

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/pixel

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/pixel

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/P/pixel.html