Thursday, October 7, 2021

Display Resolution


We just learned about the Pixel.

Another part of how a monitor works is the Display Resolution.

We learned that a pixel is a picture element that helps draw a picture on the computer screen.
When you are looking at the computer, the picture will look more like a real life image depending on the pixel size, monitor size, and colors you can use.

If you have a normal sized computer monitor but you can only fit 100 pixels across and 100 pixels down, that makes for 10,000 pixels.
That seems like a lot, but computers these days usually show anything from 480,000 pixels on one screen to over 2 million pixels on one screen!
You can have the same size monitor but switch between low resolution (bigger pixels) and high resolution (small pixels) to fit in as many as you can on the screen.

In the first computers, colors were really only white or black, or sometimes green or black.
Some of the first computers made just for video games like the Atari could use 256 colors.
That might seem like a lot, but the computers today can use about 16 million different colors!


(from: wikipedia - display resolution)


(from: wikipedia - list of video game console palettes)

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