Sawtooth distortion

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Sawtooth distortion is a computer graphics defect. It was common in older computer graphics with low colors. It refers to the staircase effect of zooming in on low-color computer graphics without any form of filtering. Each pixelated "step" resembles a sawtooth.

Bilinear filtering, smooths pixels of an image when you zoom in close which removes all forms of sawtooth distortion. With today's high-color computer graphics, even without filtering, if you zoom in on an image the large amounts of colors alone reduce the sawtooth effect. You can imagine that the effect was most prevalent with two color, black & white graphics. Today's high colors combined with bilinear filtering completely eliminates sawtooth distortion.