Fat Bottomed Pixels, They Make The Rockin

You know what a pixel is or a least you think you do. In reality it is something that you totally take for granted as the basic unit of the images that have literally invaded life in the last 15-20 years. Pixels are used generically for many, many different concepts that all have one thing in common and that is some sort of image. You could be talking about the dot in a printed image, or the cell of a lcd screen, or simply the resolution that a display is capable of displaying, or more technically the binary code that a computer uses to store an image file.

The computer revolution has lead to huge advances and has taken computer graphics much closer to the true representation of objects in life that we see with our eyes. This is most apparent in the areas of video games and digital photography. When someone is referring to pixels as in the code that a computer uses to store the image digitally it may be more helpful to refer to them as texels.

So how can such complex information be stored into a computer and understood in binary, that is a series of ones and zeros? Well I am going to attempt in the next one and one half paragraphs to give you a whirlwind explanation. So we will start with black and white. Here each number in binary code refers to an intensity of the pixel. Therefore all eight zeros in a eight bit image construct which equals zeros would represent black or in other words no intensity. On the other hand all 1