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Comment by calibas | Hacker News Reader

We're going off on tangents here, I only brought this up to reinforce the idea that a pixel is not a little square.

And I guess I should have explicitly stated that I'm not talking about high-DPI displays, subpixel rendering obviously doesn't do much good there!

My point is simply this, if you don't treat pixel like discrete little boxes that display a single color, you can use subpixels to effectively increase the resolution on low-DPI monitors. Yes, you can use greyscale antialiasing instead, you will even get better performance, but the visual quality will suffer on your standard desktop PC monitor.

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Yes, LCD subpixel rendering is a tangent, it’s not relevant to Alvy-Ray’s point. And again, LCD subpixel rendering is treating pixels as little squares; cutting a square pixel into 3 rectangles doesn’t change anything with respect to what Alvy Ray was talking about. So-called grayscale antialiasing on low-DPI displays is nearly as good as LCD subpixel, the quality differences are pretty minor. (Plus it’s a tradeoff and you get the downside of chromatic aberration.) I think you’re suggesting visual quality suffers when you don’t do any antialiasing at all, which is true, but that’s not what Alvy-Ray was talking about. Treating a pixel like a square does not imply lack of antialiasing.

I should have been more clear, I'm not responding to Alvy-Ray's article, I was simply adding to the idea that a pixel is not a little square.

If you don't treat a logical pixel like a discrete little square, you can take advantage of subpixel geometry to effectively increase the resolution. It's not the same as antialiasing, even though it can be used for antialiasing.

Arguably, instead of treating pixels as squares, you're treating them as three times as many rectangles, but that should still contradict the mental model of pixels as little squares.

> that should still contradict the mental model of pixels as little squares.

No, it doesn’t. You seem to be missing this point. Using subpixel rectangles does not in any way correct the misconception, it perpetuates it.

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