You got it backwards:
Pixel artworks are digital mosaics.
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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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?
FWIW, pixels don't have to be square or in a grid.
Some professional cameras take photos with hexagonal pixels, for example
FWIW, pixels don't have to be square or in a grid.
Are autochrome starch particles subpixels? How many are there in a pixel?
Some professional cameras take photos with hexagonal pixels, for example
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 just means picture element. Pixels also can be different shapes but squares.
Pixel art is usually a square grid though
Who says it has to be? /s
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 (one RGGB period of the repeating pattern is one full element, not two).
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.