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How exactly does a computer create an image on the screen?

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Andrew Daviel
built my own PC around 1978 · Author has 21.1K answers and 23.6M answer views · 4y
Originally Answered: How exactly the computer creates an image on the screen?
Let’s go back a few years and talk about television. Computers used television monitors
because there were lots around and they were cheap, rather than inventing a totally new way
of displaying pictures.

The human eye sees things using light-sensitive cells in the retina. There are 3 types of colour-
sensitive cells (code cells), red blue and green. Our brain interprets different proportions of
those as different colours, e.g. red and green together as yellow. To have a computer display
yellow, we don’t need it to actually display yellow, we only need it to show some red and
green. That makes life simpler. Then, technology limited us as to how much resolution we
could show, and now, we’re approaching the limit of what the human eye can resolve,
because it only has so many cells in the retina. TV required a picture to be split into bits that
could be sent over radio and reassembled; what was chosen was a series of horizontal lines (as
opposed to, say, vertical lines or spirals or random squiggles). The camera sensor scans across
a horizontal line and generates brightness and colour signals from left to right, then skips
back and down and does the same for a new line, until after about 500 lines (or 630, or 1024)
it has scanned a complete image, then it goes back to the top and starts again. On a colour
TV, the screen is split into thousands of triplets of coloured phosphor dots, red, blue and
green, so each line is composed of a few hundred dots, and the complete picture is made of a Related questions
few hundred lines.
How are images displayed on screen by
For a computer to generate an image to feed to a TV, it has to generate the colour and code?
brightness signals in the right place. Computer memory is like a continuous line of ever-
increasing address number, so it is mapped onto lines of the display. Locations 0–511 are the How does a computer monitor display
first line, 512–1023 the next line and so on. Each location has a 24-bit value, 3 bytes, each byte images and videos?
representing an amount of red, green and blue. All 0 means black, all 1’s means saturated
How are images displayed on computer
white. There is a graphics chip which reads out the consecutive memory locations in the
screens?
correct order, and runs the bytes through a digital to analog converter, e.g. 0 becomes 0V, 512
becomes 1V, 1024 becomes 2V - a voltage corresponding to brightness. In an old-style tube How do monitors draw images on a
TV, those voltages controlled the intensity of an electron beam, one for each colour, which screen?
wrote onto an array of phosphor dots, causing them to emit visible light. In a modern LCD or
LED monitor, the circuits emulate an old TV because that’s the easiest way to do it rather than How is an image formed in monitors? If
reinventing everything from scratch. the monitor did not exist, how would I…

So you have an area inside the computer memory that is mapped onto the monitor. If you How are images made on the screen?
create a program that writes hex 00 00 FF to a particular byte triplet, that will make a
particular pixel on the screen turn blue. So if you want to make a letter on the screen, you just
need to know the pattern of dots or vector strokes to make A, B, C etc. and then you use a
library routine to do it over and over. When I build my first PC back in 1978 or so, I drew out
letters on squared paper to design a font, and programmed the bits into memory one by one
so that the computer would display text on a TV (by way of a UHF modulator, since real
computer monitors were much too expensive).
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Tyler Frankel
Studied Computers & Electronics at East Mecklenburg High (Graduated 2021) · Author has 168
answers and 509.8K answer views · 4y

To fully explain this would take a really long time. In essence, it breaks down to binary and
assembly language. If you have a vector graphic, all of the lines and fill colors are created via
mathematical equations that are then encoded into an image by the GPU or CPU. Each line’s
size, weight, angle, etc. is part of an equation. In a Raster graphic, each individual pixel is
recorded with its individual size, color, and (possibly) transparency respectively in what’s
referred to as a bit map (a map of each pixel and its properties). On a basic level, it looks like
this:

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Gary Hicks
Senior QA Test Engineer (2016–present) · Author has 2.2K answers and 1.8M answer views ·
Updated 2y
Originally Answered: How exactly the computer creates an image on the screen?
How exactly does a computer create an image on the screen?

Being pedantic, it doesn't.

The GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) constructs an image in the video frame buffer (I think)
pixel by pixel (pixel = picture element — pix el). Once the frame buffer is full, that data is
pushed to the correct port (HDMI, DVI et al).

The monitor receives the data and, with an LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) monitor, activates or
deactivated the corresponding LCD cell with the correct current to produce the required
colour.

For an HD — 1,920 x 1,080 — display that is 2,077,036 pixels and for a UHD (4K) — 3,840 x
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2,160
4

Vinay Bharadwaj
MS in Computer Science (Georgia Tech) · Upvoted by Chaitanya Kulkarni, M.S Computer Science,
University of Florida (2017) · 9y

Related How are images displayed on screen by code?

First, a little about how we perceive images and then the details about how it is displayed on
the computer screen.

Every object's color we see is a composite of Red, Green and Blue components. The mixture of
these primary colors in different proportions produces the entire spectrum of colors we can
see. There are two ways we can understand this - One is the additive color system and the
second is the subtractive color system.

In an additive color scheme, we understand colors

Continue as a mixture of primary colors - Red, Green
Reading
and Blue (RGB). For example, Yellow is an equal mixture of Red and Green col
153 2 6

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How is data displayed on the screen of a computer?

What is a computer-generated picture produced on a computer screen?

Can an image be formed without a screen?
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How do computers see and understand images?

Rahul Mishra
Former Researcher · 2y

Ever Wondered What Makes Your Display Tick?

Every display technology has one common backing principle: Based on the information in a
video signal, the display lights up thousands of tiny dots (called pixels) with a high-
energy beam of electrons. In most systems, there are three pixel colors -- red, green and
blue -- which are evenly distributed on the screen. By combining these colors in
different proportions, the television can produce the entire color spectrum. However,
having said this, each technology makes use of different materials for its pixels, with new and
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more energy efficient method
1

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Jeremy Johnson
IT/Network Administrator · Author has 3.4K answers and 10.7M answer views · 4y

Without getting into specifics of different display technology (crt, lcd, plasma, oled etc),
technologies like HDR, and data message formats in cables….here is the basic concept:

The computer has to tell the monitor pixel by pixel what color to display.

This is done by providing a value for the intensity of Red, intensity of Blue, and intensity of
Green from a scale of 0 to 255 (which is 8 bits per color). There is usually also data on
horizontal and/or vertical refresh rate to keep things looking smooth.

Aaron Adams
Gaming, programming, and pixel-depth image editing · Author has 957 answers and 4.5M answer
views · 4y

Related How is data displayed on the screen of a computer?

The screens of computers are made up of thousands of tiny dots called pixels.

Each of these tiny dots are also made up of their own three dots called subpixels.

Each subpixel is either red, green, or blue. These subpixels light up in different mixtures of
intensity, in order to crate a unique color.

For example, to make white, all of the subpixels will turn on.

To make yellow, only the green and red subpixels will turn on.

To make black, all of them will turn off.

Here's a really good picture I took of my computer's mouse cursor on a white background:
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23

Vladislav Zorov
programming enthusiast. · Author has 16K answers and 60.7M answer views · 1y

Related Do all screens need continuous power to show an image?

Nope - eInk doesn’t:
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1.1K 5 9

Tony Apuzzo
Director of Engineering (2018–present) · Author has 200 answers and 236.7K answer views · 4y
Originally Answered: How exactly the computer creates an image on the screen?
Andrew’s answer is very good and I can’t really improve on it, read his answer first and then
come back here and watch the linked videos to understand his answer better.

How a TV Works in Slow Motion - The Slow Mo Guys

Images, Pixels and RGB

History of the Pixel as Fast As Possible

Steve Baker
Senior Software Engineer (2013–present) · Author has 26.5K answers and 153.9M answer views · 4y

Related If we created a world inside a computer with people who were conscious,
could they create a computer that was more powerful than the one that contains
their universe?
Obviously, you can’t get something from nothing - so from our perspective - no, that’s
impossible.

But from the perspective of the beings inside the simulation, they could certainly have the
benefit of much faster computers than we have in our real world.

How is this possible?

Well, suppose we build our simulation so that the passage of time in the simulation is a lot
slower than ours. Suppose we allow it to take 100 seconds of our time for one second to pass
by inside our simulation. All of their laws of physics would operate 100 times slower than
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ours…but so long as it’s all kept consistent, th
23 2

Nawal Singh
Elecronics and Communication Engineering, VIT University · Updated 3y

Related How do microprocessors work?

Originally Answered: How do a microprocessor work?
Believe it or not Microprocessor is nothing but a big Calculator. Even if you are reading
this post, your computer is doing some sort of calculation. We have converted everything to
numbers(digital).

You might have read everywhere microprocessor is made up of billions of gates. Don’t get
afraid of ‘billion’. Those billions are just copies. It is very easy on abstraction level. Once a
system is designed for 1 bit it is very easy to make it for large bits. Digital Logic Design is
study of basic functionality of digital circuits.
Continue Reading
It all starts from basic gates AND, NOT, OR, NOR, etc(These are made
22 1
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How are images displayed on screen by code?

How does a computer monitor display images and videos?

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