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Comment by grandempire | Hacker News Reader

What is a little rectangle? Physical display pixels are separate RGB leds with a non-rectangular shape.

Many video formats use rectangular pixels. It's less common these days, but there were no squares on DVDs for example.

Even some VGA modes have non-square pixels, and these were used by many games and... Windows 9x splash screen.

BBC Micro in graphics mode 2 the pixel is a 2:1 rectangle. Other geometries for different modes. It's going back a bit, but very much living memory!

https://beebwiki.mdfs.net/MODE_2

In medical imaging, data are often acquired using anisotropic resolution. So a pixel (or voxel in 3D) can be an averaged signal sample originating from 2mm of tissue in one direction and 0.9mm in another direction.

and it’s displayed with a completely different algorithm…

They're rectangles on my monitor.

If black and white or some other cases, but there are typically subpixels that can make things like sparse enough text stroke transitions get 3X horizontal resolution.

The subpixels are rectangles on most screens.

They tend to have rounded or cut corners and are not uniform.

Do the 3 separate sub pixels look like a photoshop pixel?

I'm not sure what you mean by Photoshop pixel.

They also look more like a square when I back away. And the mismatch of the square model doesn't mean the point model is good.

> And the mismatch of the square model

So your intuition for why squares makes sense is wrong, but you’re still holding on to it.

> doesn't mean the point model is good.

What does show it’s a good model is all the theory of image processing and the implementation of this theory in camera display systems.

You’re welcome to propose an alternative theory, and if that is consistent, try to get manufacturers to adopt it.

> So your intuition for why squares makes sense is wrong, but you’re still holding on to it.

I said subpixels are rectangles. Because they are.

If the point model was all you need, then objects small enough to slip between points would be invisible. Which is not the case.

In particular a shot of the night sky would look pure black.

So if being wrong means we should abandon the model, then we can't use squares or points.

> I said subpixels are rectangles. Because they are

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Pixel_ge...

I look forward to your paper about a superior digital image representation.

So is this a cheap gotcha because I only said "my monitor" and "most screens" the first couple times and didn't repeat it a third time? It's the one labeled just "LCD".

Or are you arguing that the slightly rounded corners on the rectangles make a significant difference in how the filtering math works out? It doesn't. On a scale between "gaussian" and "perfect rectangles", the filtering for this shape is 95% toward the latter.

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