pixels are dots on a screen, and a screen has a set point of these dots that are projecting light in different colors, so that you can see pictures, text etc on your screen. How many active pixels are used on a screen depends on your resolution, you can test it yourself by setting your screen to 800 x 600 px and see that everything will
a)be much more 'pixelated'
b)become much bigger
it's point b that is the clue because when I resize a picture to, say 500 x 500 pixels, I set that a screen should use 500 of it's pixels to show it. Therefore, if you are on a small screen with the resolution 800 x 600 it would fill up 5/8 of your screen (width), but if you were on a newer/bigger screen with 1280 x 800 then it would appear much smaller.
It's the same thing with sizes of monitors, if you have one 15" monitor with 1024 x 768 and one 21" monitor with 1024 x 768 then on the 15" everything would appear smaller, since you are "cramming" more pixels into a smaller physical area.
It's pretty hard when you are used to mesuring everything in pixels to suddenly look upon things in physical size. There is, in every file a "ppi" or "dpi", dots/pixels per inch. (I am moving on thin ice here, so if I am terribly wrong then correct me, and diabolical baby, don't hit me if I misinform you!!) - a picture has, say 300 dpi, 300 dots per inch, Then a compter screen will read 300 pixels (which will be 50% of the height of your screen if you are running 800 x 600, regardless of the physical height of your monitor) for every inch of the picture. So a picture that is 900 pixels wide with a dpi/ppi of 300 will be 3 inches wide.
And may I had what a MAJOR pain the bum this is if you are living in places that uses the metric system >_<
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glunge
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