Pixels. The more the better. Really.

I hate to be seen as overly critical, but, in the same way you'd want to get a doctor who didn't know the difference between a suppository and a syringe struck off the medical register, you have to wonder about anyone who doesn't understand even the basics about pixels.

I read a review this morning about a new netbook computer. Unlike the hundreds of identikit devices that have exploded onto the scene like a rash, this one had a feature that made it stand out: a 1366 x 768 screen, instead of the usual, meagre, 1024 x 600; this latter resolution being just wide enough for the majority of web pages to be displayed without sideways scrolling, but still an annoying paucity short of a full screen for most people.

The reviewer's take on this improved resolution was that it would make the text harder to read.

That's a bit like winning the lottery and complaining you've got to spend some of the money on a safe.

And anyway, does it make the text harder to read? Possibly, if you've got marginal eyesight, because it will be slightly smaller. But you can use that resolution to either fit more text on the screen, or, if your astigmatism completely defeats you below a certain distance and text size, you can make the text bigger.

And when you do, it will look better as well, because you've got more pixels to accurately describe each character in a given font.

This type of misunderstanding is endemic in the digital signage industry. It's the biggest reason why some displays lose impact: because they're fuzzy. Even with digital interfaces almost universally available now, if you don't prepare your graphics at the native resolution of the screen, and - even if you do - if your screen isn't set to its native resolution, then the results will be dismal.

On the other hand, when you get it right, graphics look crisp and vibrant, even on cheaper displays.

Understanding resolutions in digital signage should be as fundamental as understanding hygiene in surgery.

Pixellation

I've never been a fan of pixels.

I mean, they're square, whereas virtually nothing in the real world is.

But I like them even less now that just about everyone has an opinion on them, which is usually that the more of them you have, the better.

You can hardly blame them (people, not pixels, that is) because digital cameras and screens keep getting better - visibly so; and, at the same time, they seem to have more and more pixels. So it's an easy causal connection to spot.

Except that it's not necessarily true.

And I'm not even referring here to the increasingly commonly accepted truth that if you have too many pixels in a restricted space the resulting electronic noise will outweigh the resolution benefits. Nor am I talking about the fact that if you have gazillions of perfectly nice pixels but a horrible lens you'll get an accurate capture of a terrible optical image.

What I mean is, we don't see in pixels.

The way we see is at least an order of magnitude more complicated than any electronic/digital imaging device we've ever build. Software emulations of our brain mechanisms have at least twelve simultaneous processes going on to identify and track an image. And none of them use pixels.

Ultimately, the closer we get to the actual point of perception (is there such a point?) what we are seeing is objects, not pixels.

We percieve a face, a zebra, a pair of glasses, and a bannana (although, typically, not in the same scene). When we remember an image of a face on the television, we don't remember the pattern of pixels: we remember the features.

And we have, in our heads, a database of features. That's how we recognise things: from a kit of parts.

And this, I think, is the future of video.

Demonstrations of Ultra High Definition, with as many as sixteen megapixels per frame (as opposed to around 2.5 mexapixels for "standard" high definition) are incredibly impressive. But unless they show more "objects", then, ultimately it's pointless.

What this means is that when we compress video, we shouldn't be looking at patterns of pixels, but identifying objects, and storing them in a heirachical set of characteristics.

Playing them back would be a case of redrawing the scene with vectors rather than pixels.

And, as we all know, vector graphics always look sharp. Whatever the resolution of the playback device.

Interestingly, what we now know as "artifacts" would come in two varieties with vector video:

As the bandwidth drops, faces would become less recognisable and more generic.

And as the data connection fails completely, instead of seeing the "multicoloured chess board" type of artifacts that you get with MPEG, instead of a face, you might get a teapot.