It's not quite the same, and here is why: In audio, the samples from an ADC are generally very close to point-samples indeed. Not quite, because ADCs can not sample the input at infinite small times. Or actually really point-like if generated algorithmically.

However, this is not true for pixels. The meaning of the pixel values in a source image is arbitrary. It can be point-like, but I would argue it mostly isn't.

Pixels in a display device /never/ are point-like. They always fill an area. That's just a physical reality.

We also can not use a simple band pass to limit the (spatial) frequency content. If you take the videolinked in the sister comment, and assume that t is a spatial direction.

A pattern like __^^^___^^^___^^, that is black-white-black-white... would show ringing when the slopes don't match pixel borders. What do we do instead? Either align it, or integrate over the pixel area. I.e., the pixel overlapping the slopes would have grey values.

(Edit: realized parent post didn't link the video)

With pixel data, we have low enough resolutions that our thinking is biased towards the display device the majority of the time; we can author "pixel art" that expects the results to look square, or very close to square. And when we resize that art, we don't interpolate the color values(unless we want it to look like shit), we use a simple drop-sample or nearest-neighbor. But when we resize photographic images, suddenly we have a reason to do other things. Take for example this Stack Overflow answer on Lanczos resampling. [0] It describes exactly what you say we can't and don't use, but is actually used every day in Photoshop: a filter kernel that produces ringing artifacts on black-white patterns. As I allude to with the pixel art, it depends on the source content. When we get an image off of a camera, it's sampled in a way that assumes the pixels are points as impulses, and thus should be processed "as if" they are convolutions of the sinc function, even though the data itself is "just" points. Digital photographs always look blurry or noisy when examined pixel-by-pixel, and only form coherency to our eyes when viewed more distantly. For similar reasons, pixel artists can't downsample and process arbitrary photos and pass them off as legitimate pixel art, because the original content isn't designed towards the display of square or near-square pixels.

[0] http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/10931/what-is-lanczos...

Also watch this extremely informative video from xiph.org: http://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml

Thanks, excellent video to understand what people are talking about in this thread.

My favorite video that drives this point home: http://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml

Using actual signal generators and oscilloscopes, this guy proves by experiment everything you said. Goes into differences between sampling rate and quantization depth as well. Well worth the watch.