Dot Pitch

This is the measurement used to determine how sharp the display of a monitor is. It is measured in millimeters and the smaller the number, the better. Most standard cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors will have a dot pitch between .25 and .28. However, some of the big presentation monitors may have a dot pitch from .30 to .50 (which would suck for a standard 17" desktop monitor). The difference between a "dot" (as in dot pitch) and a pixel is that a pixel is mapped to the dots on the screen. When the monitor is set to lower resolutions, one pixel encompasses multiple dots. In a cathode ray tube (CRT) display with a shadow mask, the dot pitch is measured as the distance between the holes of the shadow mask, again in millimeters. So what's a shadow mask? Well, it's basically a metal screen full of holes which the three electron beams (red green and blue) pass through and focus to a single point on the tube's phosphor surface. Ooh. In a CRT that uses an aperture grill (like a Sony Trinitron monitor), the dot pitch is measured by the distance between adjacent slots where electron beams of the same color pass through.