Term used to describe the notion of equipment that can operate at more than one resolution. Dedicated TV equipment is designed to operate at a single resolution although some modern equipment, especially that using the ITU-R 601 standard, can switch between the specific formats and aspect ratios of 525/60 and 625/50.

By their nature, computers can handle files of any size, so when applied to imaging, they are termed resolution independent. As the images get bigger so the amount of processing, storage and data transfer demanded increases, in proportion to the resulting file size. So, for a given platform, the speed of operation slows. Other considerations when changing image resolution may be reformatting disks, checking if the RAM is sufficient to handle the required size of file, allowing extra time for RAM/disk caching and how to show the picture on an appropriate display.