Pixel resolution

The other day I ran across this very useful resolution chart at Wikipedia:

While not all resolutions I come across are listed (where are QCIF, 176x144, and CIF, 352x288, for instance) and the PAL resolution seems incorrect (they quote 768x576) this is still quite a nice diagram.

Tested pixels

I just ordered a new camera for personal use. It'll be my first SLR. Most cameras I've held, either in the office or at home, I have pointed to this chart to test the camera:


You can get the original from Stephen Westin in pdf here. Simply printing it on any decent laser printer does a pretty good job. If you have an A3 printer, even better. It's interesting to see that most of today's camera phones don't even do a low-pass filter before subsampling on the viewfinder, causing bad aliasing. There's still lots of room for improvement!

User-generated pixels

Ever heard of a show called Fun TV with Kato-chan and Ken-chan? Me neither. It was quite successful in Japan in the mid 1980s though and featured some of the first user-generated content. Later, ABC's America's Funniest Home Videos would follow the same recipe of showing slapstick movies that people captured at home with their camcorders. Fast forward to 2005, the year that YouTube was born based on the same principle, but on the internet. In 2007, less than two years later, YouTube was sold for $1.6 billion dollars to Google. Nowadays, over 9 billion videos are watched online per month in the US alone, and YouTube has about 30% of that market. That's quite a lot of user-generated pixels, and for sure a number that will keep on growing for quite some time to come.