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Pixels

Have you ever sat up really, really close to the television, so close that you can't tell what the image on the screen is anymore and all you can see are these eeny-weeny little phosphorescent dots? Well each of those teeny tiny dots on the screen has a name. It is called a pixel, and on your average TV screen there are many, many thousands of them, more than you or I can count.

Like on a TV, pixels live on your computer monitor too. If you have a computer monitor with a resolution of 640 * 480, this means that every image you see on it contains 640 * 480 pixels, which is 307,200 little phosphorescent dots! And the higher the resolution of your monitor, the more dots per image you get. Got a montior of resolution 1280 * 960? Then each image you see is made up of 1280 * 960, or 1,228,800 pixels. Woah!

Many people who currently use the web have monitors that run about 640 pixels wide, and they are looking at the internet with browsers that span roughly 500 pixels and no more. On a machine that has a low resolution (640 * 480, for example), 500 pixels is about 5 or 6 inches. On a higher resolution machine (say 1280 * 960), 500 pixels will be about three inches wide, maybe a touch less.

If, then, you want to make an image for the web, you're generally not going to want to make it any more than 500 pixels wide. If it's any bigger than this, people on lower resolution machines may have to stretch their browsers to take a good look at it, which may make some users kind of huffy, so beware.