Another Daft Question From Me. Yay!

[Myrm]

KK,

Well I'm confused.

Are individual pixels all the same size no matter what the size of the screen?

I ask as I have a 15.6" screen with 1920x1080 resolution, yet I see some people have, for example, a 17.3" screen measuring 1920x1080. If their screen is almost 2 inches bigger than mine why does it not have more pixels/resolution?

 

[Rakk]

Well I'm confused.
Are individual pixels all the same size no matter what the size of the screen?

No they are not.
That is why you can have 15" laptop screens having 1920x1080 pixels and also 24" monitors having 1920x1080, both screens display the same amount of pixels, just the ones on the bigger screens/monitors have bigger ones
I think its more how many bits can the screen be divided into, cos a 1920x1080 screen can also display in the smaller resolutions, so in that case each 'pixel' just takes up more space on the screen.

Edit: I don't think I explained that very well ....

 

[steaky360]

I agree with Rakk's description. Any display with a 1920 x 1080 resolution will display the same number of pixels. This is why a grainy youtube video could look ok displayed on a 21" monitor (smaller individual pixels blend in making the image seem better) but terrible if displayed on a 52" TV screen of the same resolution

 

[ubuysa]

Pixel is an abbreviation for "picture element" and they are the individual dots on the screen that make up the image. A picture on your 1920 x 1080 screen may look contiguous but it's really a collection of individual dots and between the dots is black space. So you're really seeing only a part of the image, but your eye cannot resolve the individual dots nor the black space between them (well, not very well).

They key really is how many dots there are per inch of your screen (the dpi). Screen sizes are measured diagonally and to find the dpi of your screen you should square the height in pixels and add this to the square of the width in pixels. The square root of this number divided by the diagonal size of your screen (in inches) is your dpi. For a 15.6" 1920 x 1080 screen the dpi is 141.2, for a 17.3" 1920 x 1080 screen the dpi is 127.3. So the dot density of the 15.6" is higher than the dot density of the 17.3" as you would of course expect and the pixels on the 15.6" screen are physically smaller than they are on the 17.3" screen.

The human eye can't really distinguish between these two dpi values so an image on a 17.3" screen looks as good as one on a 15.6" screen, it's just much bigger.

 

[Myrm]

Thanks for that awesome information, Ubuysa.

 

[ubuysa]

Thanks for that awesome information, Ubuysa.

Glad it helped!