A computer monitor is an output device that displays information in pictorial or textual form. A discrete monitor comprises a visual display, support electronics, power supply, housing, electrical connectors, and external user controls.
ClearType is Microsoft's implementation of subpixel rendering technology in rendering text in a font system. ClearType attempts to improve the appearance of text on certain types of computer display screens by sacrificing color fidelity for additional intensity variation. This trade-off is asserted to work well on LCD flat panel monitors.
In digital imaging, a pixel, pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest addressable element in a dot matrix display device. In most digital display devices, pixels are the smallest element that can be manipulated through software.
The RGB color model is an additive color model in which the red, green and blue primary colors of light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three additive primary colors, red, green, and blue.
In digital signal processing, spatial anti-aliasing is a technique for minimizing the distortion artifacts (aliasing) when representing a high-resolution image at a lower resolution. Anti-aliasing is used in digital photography, computer graphics, digital audio, and many other applications.
A plasma display panel (PDP) is a type of flat panel display that uses small cells containing plasma: ionized gas that responds to electric fields. Plasma televisions were the first large flat panel displays to be released to the public.
Color depth or colour depth, also known as bit depth, is either the number of bits used to indicate the color of a single pixel, or the number of bits used for each color component of a single pixel. When referring to a pixel, the concept can be defined as bits per pixel (bpp). When referring to a color component, the concept can be defined as bits per component, bits per channel, bits per color, and also bits per pixel component, bits per color channel or bits per sample (bps). Modern standards tend to use bits per component, but historical lower-depth systems used bits per pixel more often.
Dot pitch is a specification for a computer display, computer printer, image scanner, or other pixel-based devices that describe the distance, for example, between dots (sub-pixels) on a display screen. In the case of an RGB color display, the derived unit of pixel pitch is a measure of the size of a triad plus the distance between triads.
Subpixel rendering is used to increase the apparent resolution of a computer's display. It takes advantage of the fact that each pixel on a color liquid crystal display (LCD) or similar are composed of individual red, green, and blue subpixels with different locations, so that the color also causes the image to shift in space.
Font rasterization is the process of converting text from a vector description to a raster or bitmap description. This often involves some anti-aliasing on screen text to make it smoother and easier to read. It may also involve hinting—information embedded in the font data that optimizes rendering details for particular character sizes.
Dither is an intentionally applied form of noise used to randomize quantization error, preventing large-scale patterns such as color banding in images. Dither is routinely used in processing of both digital audio and video data, and is often one of the last stages of mastering audio to a CD.
In photography and image processing, color balance is the global adjustment of the intensities of the colors. An important goal of this adjustment is to render specific colors – particularly neutral colors like white or grey – correctly. Hence, the general method is sometimes called gray balance, neutral balance, or white balance. Color balance changes the overall mixture of colors in an image and is used for color correction. Generalized versions of color balance are used to correct colors other than neutrals or to deliberately change them for effect. White balance is one of the most common kinds of balancing, and is when colors are adjusted to make a white object appear white and not a shade of any other colour.
The screen-door effect (SDE) is a visual artifact of displays, where the fine lines separating pixels become visible in the displayed image. This can be seen in digital projector images and regular displays under magnification or at close range, but the increases in display resolutions have made this much less significant. More recently, the screen door effect has been an issue with virtual reality headsets and other head-mounted displays, because these are viewed at a much closer distance, and stretch a single display across a much wider field of view.
Font hinting is the use of mathematical instructions to adjust the display of an outline font so that it lines up with a rasterized grid. At low screen resolutions, hinting is critical for producing clear, legible text. It can be accompanied by antialiasing and subpixel rendering for further clarity.
Multisample anti-aliasing (MSAA) is a type of spatial anti-aliasing, a technique used in computer graphics to remove jaggies.
Large-screen television technology developed rapidly in the late 1990s and 2000s. Prior to the development of thin-screen technologies, rear-projection television was standard for larger displays, and jumbotron, a non-projection video display technology, was used at stadiums and concerts. Various thin-screen technologies are being developed, but only liquid crystal display (LCD), plasma display (PDP) and Digital Light Processing (DLP) have been publicly released. Recent technologies like organic light-emitting diode (OLED) as well as not-yet-released technologies like surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) or field emission display (FED) are in development to replace earlier flat-screen technologies in picture quality.
Interferometric modulator display is a technology used in electronic visual displays that can create various colors via interference of reflected light. The color is selected with an electrically switched light modulator comprising a microscopic cavity that is switched on and off using driver integrated circuits similar to those used to address liquid crystal displays (LCD). An IMOD-based reflective flat panel display includes hundreds of thousands of individual IMOD elements each a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-based device.
PenTile matrix is a family of patented subpixel matrix schemes used in electronic device displays. PenTile is a trademark of Samsung. PenTile matrices are used in AMOLED and LCD displays.
Quattron is the brand name of an LCD color display technology produced by Sharp Electronics. In addition to the standard RGB color subpixels, the technology utilizes a yellow fourth color subpixel (RGBY) which Sharp claims increases the range of displayable colors, and which may mimic more closely the way the brain processes color information. The screen is a form of multi-primary color display, other forms of which have been developed in parallel to Sharp's version.
This is a glossary of terms relating to computer graphics.
Triangular (Delta)
Stripes
Diagonal
