Vector? Bitmap? What’s that?

In a nutshell, bitmap images are a bunch of dots. If you blow up the image, the dots get bigger and the image looks pixelated. (horrible)

38px Bitmap Star bitmat star blown up
A bitmap star that’s 38 px wide Portion of same star blown up to 1090 px wide

Vector images are curves (or angles). If you blow up the image, the curves get bigger, but no matter how big you blow it up, it will be an exact replica of the original.

38px Vector Star
A vector star that’s 38 px wide Portion of same star blown up to 1090 px wide

Here’s a low resolution logo.  Looks fine.

Devco Logo

Devco Logo

Until you zoom in. (click on image to blow up)

zoomed in to bitmap

Zoomed in to bitmap

But if the file was in a vector format, you can blow it up as big as you want and it doesn’t get blurry. (click on image to blow up)

Devco vector

Zoomed in to vector

 

See Bitmap (or Raster) and Vector in WikipediA