Pixel

February 12th, 2008 by admin

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Posted in columns, February 2008 | 6 comments

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6 comments on this post.

  1. marcparis:

    February 23rd, 2008 at 4:43 pm

    I thought that the “el” in “pixel” came from “element” (pixel = picture element). Is that correct?

  2. RolyMole:

    March 7th, 2008 at 9:22 am

    There’s also “pixelated” in the sense of having some pixels in an image deliberately smeared, cleared or otherwise obscured to prevent something undesirable being seen – e.g. a face that could be recognised or a pornographic image.

  3. ShiftR:

    March 8th, 2008 at 11:59 pm

    Pixelated was first used in the nerd world, I believe, to refer to any image whose visual quality was reduced by the perception of the pixels themselves. Later the effect was adopted to deliberately obscure images. Textbooks certainly give ‘picture element’ as the origin of pixel. There are also ‘voxels’, the 3D equivalent of 2D pixels. Somewhere out there there are probably one or more aged nerds who believe they coined ‘pixel’. So why are words ‘coined’?

  4. Topi Linkala:

    May 3rd, 2009 at 3:34 am

    @SiftR: Words are coined because in a technical document using the full definition every time would make the reading (more) tedious.

  5. thepratingknave:

    July 8th, 2009 at 11:14 pm

    @Topi Linkala: I believe ShiftR was inquiring as to how the term ‘coined’ was, well, coined. I’ve often wondered myself.

  6. mr.kanada:

    January 29th, 2010 at 2:27 pm

    I started using the word ‘pixelated’ back in 1999 when I was listening to my friends in college talk about pixels and such for his graphic design project. I wittingly ;) described his ‘distorted/blurry’ picture he had on his screen as ‘pixelated’ where he promptly laughed at me and said there was no such word.

    So does that mean I came up with the word and it spread across the world like wildfire? I coined the word! Sweet!

    Hahaha, needless to say, I am not a nerd. Far from it actually.

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