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Why aren't we using variable shaped pixel? The image quality seems so much higher than the square pixel used today. See the short but interesting video in the

Why aren't we using variable shaped pixel? The image quality seems so much higher than the square pixel used today. See the short but interesting video in the linked article.

someperson 6y ago
Link for the lazy: https://vimeo.com/22179638 https://vimeo.com/22179638 It's worth noting that many OLED displays used in smartphones don't have square pixels but are actually made up of a "pentile subpixel matrix" (do an image search for those keywords to see what I mean). That said those non-square red/green/blue subpixels are fixed and Russel Kirsch suggestion seems to be to somehow display differently shaped pixels arbitrarily. I'm not sure the kind of display technology he thinks could achieve that. Maybe E-Ink displays used in eBook readers like Amazon Kindle might be able to achieve this when the magnetic field is applied in a certain way? I'm not sure. Also I came across this quote from his son: > Walden Kirsch said he regrets his father was unable to appreciate how prevalent that technology has become. For somebody who had Alzheimer’s disease, he seems very lucid in that 2011 video. The world hasn't changed that much in the last 9 years so I think it's pretty clear that he understood the impact his work had on the world.
kazinator 6y ago
The image quality is higher because it has a lot more information in it; it's not accurate to compare the pixel count in a rectilinear array to the count of custom-cut tiles in a mosaic. We use rectilinear images because that's the most convenient form for addressing the picture elements in memory. Not only from the point of view of getting to a particular pixel in a frame buffer as in y * scanline_width + x. Image processing algorithms of all kinds depend on the data being a rectilinear grid of samples: that the sample rate is constant across the scan line, and vertically. We can recover image quality with higher resolution and anti-aliasing techniques. We can also use vector techniques to represent a mosaic's tiles accurately (yet compactly, for file storage and network transfer), and render them at any resolution using square pixels. If there are enough of those pixels that the human eye is well beyond giving a darn, then the issue is pretty much settled. We can prove with information theory that if the pixels are small enough, their shape does not matter. After a certain resolution level, we no longer add detail: we only improve the smoothness of anti-aliasing, and there is only so smooth it has to be relative to the frequency response of the eye's optics and retina.

Why aren't we using variable shaped pixel? The image quality seems so much higher than the square pixel used today. See the short but interesting video in the linked article.

someperson 6y ago

Link for the lazy: https://vimeo.com/22179638 https://vimeo.com/22179638 It's worth noting that many OLED displays used in smartphones don't have square pixels but are actually made up of a "pentile subpixel matrix" (do an image search for those keywords to see what I mean). That said those non-square red/green/blue subpixels are fixed and Russel Kirsch suggestion seems to be to somehow display differently shaped pixels arbitrarily. I'm not sure the kind of display technology he thinks could achieve that. Maybe E-Ink displays used in eBook readers like Amazon Kindle might be able to achieve this when the magnetic field is applied in a certain way? I'm not sure. Also I came across this quote from his son: > Walden Kirsch said he regrets his father was unable to appreciate how prevalent that technology has become. For somebody who had Alzheimer’s disease, he seems very lucid in that 2011 video. The world hasn't changed that much in the last 9 years so I think it's pretty clear that he understood the impact his work had on the world.

kazinator 6y ago

The image quality is higher because it has a lot more information in it; it's not accurate to compare the pixel count in a rectilinear array to the count of custom-cut tiles in a mosaic. We use rectilinear images because that's the most convenient form for addressing the picture elements in memory. Not only from the point of view of getting to a particular pixel in a frame buffer as in y * scanline_width + x. Image processing algorithms of all kinds depend on the data being a rectilinear grid of samples: that the sample rate is constant across the scan line, and vertically. We can recover image quality with higher resolution and anti-aliasing techniques. We can also use vector techniques to represent a mosaic's tiles accurately (yet compactly, for file storage and network transfer), and render them at any resolution using square pixels. If there are enough of those pixels that the human eye is well beyond giving a darn, then the issue is pretty much settled. We can prove with information theory that if the pixels are small enough, their shape does not matter. After a certain resolution level, we no longer add detail: we only improve the smoothness of anti-aliasing, and there is only so smooth it has to be relative to the frequency response of the eye's optics and retina.