Image Scalability - What Causes Image Distortion After Image Expansion?

Look at digital image of the flower in the graphic at left. How does your computer "draw" this image and display the final picture on the monitor? The answer to that can been seen visually in the right side of the graphic. Look at the series of blurry tiny squares that occur on the right side. Now look at the small red square located on the flower, what the right side is an 800% increase in the size of that part of the digital image. This lets you see what is going on underneath the hood, so to say. The computer is "painting" the flower by arranging thousands and thousands of pixels together on a micro level to create a realistic looking image. At the image's normal size you do not see this small squares. You only see this when the image is blown up significantly. In a nutshell this reflects the problem of image scalability in digital images. When a digital design is expanded far beyond its original size, there will be considerable distortion.

Look at picture below of a lake located here in Louisville, KY (Tom Wallace Lake). The original image is quite small, and if blown up you will see that the image becomes blurry, but you do not yet see the pixels in the blown-up image below. Although the expanded image looks blurry, it might be acceptable. The problem of scalability is very evident in the image at right. This is a small part of this picture expanded at 1000%. All that you can see now are pixels.