This example shows an image with a portion greatly enlarged, in which the individual pixels are rendered as little squares and can easily be seen.

A photograph of sub-pixel display elements on a laptop's LCD screen In digital imaging, a pixel (picture element[1]) is the smallest piece of information in an image. Pixels are normally arranged in a regular 2-dimensional grid, and are often represented using dots, squares, or rectangles. Each pixel is a sample of an original image, where more samples typically provide a more accurate representation of the original. The intensity of each pixel is variable; in color systems, each pixel has typically three or four components such as red, green, and blue, or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The word pixel is based on a contraction of pix (for "pictures") and el (for "element"); similar formations with el for "element" include voxel[2], luxel,[citation needed] and texel[3].