You got it backwards:
Pixel artworks are digital mosaics.
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
52 points (96.4% liked)
Showerthoughts
39543 readers
1443 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Not quite, pixel art is just a subset of mosaics.
So every pixel art is a mosaic, but not every mosaic is pixel art.
So in other words OP was right in the OP?
... no?
For a traditional broadcast redrawing every pixel per frame, definitely. Is it still a mosaic when compression algorithms prevent redrawing certain sections though? Does it then become mixed media?
Not really, mosaics have far more shapes than just squares, and they're not usually arranged in a grid either. Have you seen actual mosaics?
Pixel just means picture element. Pixels also can be different shapes but squares.
Pixel art is usually a square grid though
We'll says it has to be? /s
FWIW, pixels don't have to be square or in a grid.
Some professional cameras take photos with hexagonal pixels, for example
Are autochrome starch particles subpixels? How many are there in a pixel?
Really? I thought the Bayer filter was near-universal, and Wikipedia does not list what you just mentioned.
Anyway, older LCDs in portable color TVs, cameras and camcorders did use that pattern but that's on the display side.
You prompted me to look it up and my knowledge is apparently a bit dated on that one
I'd apparently read about Fujifilm doing this with some of their older CCD based sensors and they shifted away from that ages ago!
So they probably didn't output .raw images, I think those are more recent. That would have been a weird use of the file format!
Apparently they did have a raw format called RAF and the processing involved "demosaicing" funnily enough given the thread we are in
Pixel purists say pixels have to be in a square or rectangular grid. Stitching is a good analog example. Yet others think that 2-subpixel "pixels" (RG and BG, alternating in a checkerboard pattern), as seen on some OLED screens should be counted as half-pixels, like on Bayer-filter cameras.
Anyway, there are digital systems with other layouts:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q137757955
Early pocket color LCD TVs, cameras and camcorders would use hexagonal grids similar to shadow mask CRTs' phosphor dots.
By the way, neither color CRT phosphor dots nor stripes are pixels because they're not individually addressable. In fact, depending on the beam's position, a single phosphor dot can represent a gradient, and on B/W CRTs the whole screen is a single phosphor-covered surface.