[Japhy Riddle] was tired of creating pixel art. He went to subpixel art. The idea is that since each color pixel is composed of three subpixels, your display is actually three times as dense as you think it is. As long as you don’t care about the colors, of course.
Is it practical? No, although it is related to the Bayer filter algorithm and font antialiasing. You can also use subpixel manipulation to hide messages in plain sight.
[Japhy] shows how it all works using Photoshop, but you could do the same steps with anything that can do advanced image manipulation. Of course, you are assuming the subpixel mask is identical is for any given device, but apparently, they are mostly the same these days. You could modify the process to account for different masks.
Of course, since the subpixels are smaller, scaling has to change. In the end, you get a strange-looking image made up of tiny dots. Strange? Yes. Surreal? You bet. Useful? Well, tell us why you did it in the comments!
Pixel art isn’t just for CRTs. However, subpixel art assumes that the pixels can be divided up, which is not always the case.
This would be nice for anyone looking at photographs on the typical computer monitor. What you generally get is about 100 DPI resolution, pixels per inch really, out of the normal consumer displays. All the higher resolution monitors do is increase in physical size, not actual resolving power. If you don’t want to pay thousands of dollars, the best you’ll get is around 150 pixels per inch, and that’s a rare deal that often comes with other drawbacks. Sub-pixel rendering offers you 300-450 PPI at least in one direction, which is much better. It’s approaching proper print resolutions.
So, if you could “cheat” more spatial resolution out of a monitor by rendering your pictures with sub-pixel accuracy, albeit at the expense of color accuracy, you could look at your photographs and see things like where your photo was out of focus. Normally it just won’t show up.