Bildpunkt

Bildpunkt, in German, means picture element and is the standard term for the smallest addressable element in raster images and displays. It is the counterpart to the English term pixel. Bildpunkte form a two-dimensional grid that determines the spatial resolution and potential level of detail of an image.

Each Bildpunkt carries color and brightness information for a single location. In color images, a Bildpunkt typically encodes several color channels (for example red, green, and blue) with a color depth that often is 8 bits per channel, yielding 24 bits per Bildpunkt. Grayscale images use fewer bits per Bildpunkt.

In digital storage and processing, images are represented as matrices of Bildpunkte. Increasing the number of Bildpunkte increases the ability to reproduce fine detail, but also increases data size and bandwidth requirements. The term is widely used in German-language technical literature and is interchangeable with the term Pixel.

In displays, each Bildpunkt corresponds to a light-emitting element or subelement on the screen. The overall image emerges from the combination of brightness and color of all Bildpunkte. Display resolution is commonly given as width × height Bildpunkte, such as 1920 × 1080. In printing, fine series of dots used for tonal reproduction are sometimes referred to as Bildpunkte as well.

Related concepts include Pixel, Rastergrafik, Auflösung, and Farbtiefe.