Pixel

Updated: 09/12/2023 by Computer Hope

Pixel may refer to any of the following:

Enlarged section of a screen to show pixels.

1. Term that comes from the words PEL (picture element). A px (pixel) is the smallest portion of an image or display that a computer can print or display. You can get a better understanding of what a pixel is when zooming into an image as seen in the picture.

As you can see in this example, the character image in this picture is zoomed into at 1600%. Each of the blocks seen in the example picture is a single pixel of this image. Everything on the computer display looks similar to this when zoomed in upon. The same is true with printed images, which are created by several little dots that are measured in DPI (dots per inch).

Screen pixels

In the picture below is an example of a close up of pixels on an LCD (liquid-crystal display) screen. As shown in the picture, we've zoomed into the "he" part of the word "help" to illustrate how the display works. Each pixel has RGB (red, green, and blue) color components. The brightness of each component is increased or decreased to produce the variance of colors you see on the screen.

Display pixel on LCD

How to determine a pixel color

To get the color value of any pixel on your screen or any window use a third-party tool such as GetPixelColor from SoftwareOk.

2. Pixel may also be a shortened description of the Google Pixel smartphone.

Anti-aliasing, Aseprite, Computer acronyms, Computer portmanteaus, Dead pixel, Destructive editing, Display element, Jaggies, Megapixel, Photoshop terms, Point, Texel, Video terms, Voxel