A Pixel Is Not a Little Square (1995) [pdf]
Is this not outdated?<p>It uses examples of how pixels on scanners, printers, and CRT monitors are not squares. Fair enough. Back when this was written, one could very reasonably argue that pixels were intended to be point samples with a convolution.<p>But modern pixels on most LCD screens certainly are exceedingly crisp squares (with subpixels), and processing RAW camera sensor data, antialiasing techniques, and image resampling seems to &quot;mostly&quot; assume that pixels do represent the average color over a square rather than a point sample. Not <i>perfectly</i>, but as a reasonable first-order approximation.<p>I understand that 25 years ago it might have been reasonable to argue that pixels aren&#x27;t squares.<p>But today... aren&#x27;t they, at least as a first-order approximation? (With some further adjustments to avoid antialiasing artifacts, desired sharpness, and so forth.)<p>The idea that pixels are primarily point samples seems far <i>more</i> misleading -- as if they were analagous to audio samples which <i>are</i> point samples as a first-order approximation, but pixels are <i>nothing</i> like audio samples.