08 What is a Pixel?

There is a painting technique called pointillism. Suerat was one of those of this school. See:

http://www.webexhibits.org/colorart/jatte.html

The reason I bring this up is that these paintings are created with small dots of paint to form the image rather than lines.

Well this is what a pixel is. It is a point of light, not paint, and many of these pixels form the image. If you zoom in on a digital image that was created with only 1 million of these dots (1 megapxel in size) you see jaggies, you see the dots and the image itself is basically lost in the jumble of dots. However, if you use billions of dots, pixels, you can zoom in and see quite a bit of detail.

This is the idea behind gigapanography - create images that consists of billions of pixels rather than millions and you end up with a tremendously zoomable image that maintains its detail on the screen and even when it is printed in gigantic murals.