A pixel is the smallest unit that makes up an image, be it a photo or a frame of a video. They are present not only in movies, animations and photo captures, but they are also an important part of TV screens, monitors and smartphones and camera sensors. Here are the differences for each case.
What is pixel?
The word pixel is a combination of the terms “picture” and “element”. That is, “image element”. It is the smallest unit of a digital image, regardless of its source. If you take a picture and zoom in, you’ll see a series of squares that make it up. Each of these frames is a pixel. They are millions or thousands of them.
Each pixel is based on the three basic colors: red, green and blue. Each color has 256 shades, giving up to 16 million different color combinations. They are groupings of large pixels that form images, photos and frames of videos. The quality of an image depends on how many pixels make it up. So the more pixels, the higher the quality. We call this resolution.
Each Mario square on the left is a pixel; as Mario on the right has more pixels (higher resolution), they are not visible to the naked eye
Pixels on canvas
On TV screens, monitors, cell phones and tablets, when we mention pixel resolution, it means the number of squares they can reproduce at a time: the more they have, the higher the quality of the image displayed on that display.
A Full HD display has 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. That is, width 1,920 and height of 1,080 pixels or 2,073,600 pixels in total. By way of comparison, a 4K screen (3,840 x 2,160 pixels) has 8,294,400 pixels and an 8K (7,680 x 4,320 pixels) 33,177,600 pixels.
The difference is in the size of the pixel and not the screen. Each square of a 4K screen is four times smaller than that of a Full HD, which means that for every 1080p pixel, you have four at 2160p; likewise, the pixel of an 8K display is four times smaller than that of a 4K display. The more pixels, the higher the resolution and image quality.
Pixels on Cameras
In cameras, the term megapixel (one million pixels, symbol MP) refers to the sensor’s ability to capture pixels in a photo. For example, a 48 MP camera is capable of capturing images up to 8,000 pixels wide by 6,000 high.