You're running into 2 problems here:

• getsamples() uses the context you call it in to decide whether to produce samples packed into a string or a list of samples
• if you don't supply a width getsamples() returns samples from the given x position all the way to the right side of the image.

So to get just the sample for one pixel as an integer you'd do:

my ($sample) = $image->getsamples(x => $x, y => $y, width => 1);
[download]

But if you're looking for speed you'll probably find that working a row at a time is faster:

for my $y ( 0 .. $image->getheight() - 1 ) {
  for my $sample ($image->getsamples(y => $y)) {
    # do something with the sample
  }
}
[download]

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