By combining many pixels to create a single higher-quality pixel, oversampling also removes Bayer pattern problems and reduces noise.

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That said, HTC is a plain cheap skate for boosting size so massively without adding a single pixel -- unless it's somehow the fault of Windows Phone OS requirements, although the HTC execs we spoke didn't provide any such justification.

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Panoramas consist of 4 pictures that are processed into a single 5525 x 1485-pixel image, and while the result is surprisingly high-res, the stitching process often reveals noticeable seams.

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Those charges are funneled en masse through a single analog-to-digital converter, which outputs each pixel's value in ones and zeros.

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Each mirror acts as a beam-steering device, controlling whether a single picture element (pixel) in the image is light or dark.

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This arrangement makes the chip particularly suitable for image-processing, because each analogue element of the array can be made to correspond to a single pixel (one of the individual dots of which an image is composed).

ECONOMIST: Analogue computing