THE PIXELSHIFT: A DEFINITION (or two)

1. In classical webdesign (which has been around all of 6 years or more), there was an inherit difference/fault between Internet Explorer, Navigator, Safari, Opera and Firefox. This fault (aptly dubbed a ‘feature’ ) by certain developers that I know, caused a shift in a floated layer (.div), which would be interpreted differently in each different browser, and thus causing a layout to break.

Things like margins, paddings and the complexity (amount of nested layers in the layout) amongst other things would influence the effect of this shift. It is also the reason why most front-end webdevelopers today still prefer using seperate CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for IE and different clusters of browsers.

2. In digital cameras (camcorders) with CCD chips. Pixelshifting is used to raise the resolution of lens image to digital data. The CCD chip is moved half a pixel vertical and horizontally in steps to have a finer sample method. A higher resolution of sampling to approach full-HD via with CCD chip with less physical CCD. It is interesting to note that a CCD chip takes a snapshot of the entire frame and a CMOS sensor takes a gradual snapshot called a rolling shutter, effectively making it less responsive for higher frame rate sampling.