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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => General Internet News => Topic started by: System on June 09, 2003, 02:42:50 PM
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CNET Media News (http://news.com.com/2001-1023_3-0.html?tag=tab) has an interesting article regarding the potential demise of the .PNG graphics format which was foreseen by many as the replacement for the industry standard .GIF.
Read the full story (http://rss.com.com/2100-1032_3-1014236.html?type=pt&part=rss&tag=feed&subj=news)
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I always guessed PNG failed to make any impact - just because, in reality, not many people actually used it. Are we looking at the future of ogg vorbis too?
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Fair point, but many MP3 player manufactures claim to have OGG Vorbis firmware upgrades in the works. Maybe it will have a slightly better future... :-?
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makes no sense does it? Free open source format, which is better than most formats out there... Dies :-?
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I find this quite silly.
It's as silly reasoning as the claim that GIF would die out completely because of the Unisys patent issue.
PNG is not going anywhere.
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I won't stop using PNG's on all my websites. :-)
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PNG's are actually quite nice! i use it with GIMP, AfterEFFECTS and other programs. we used it on Children of DUNE to transfer files between (effects) shops because it's not lossy and is much smaller than the horrible tga.
maybe THOSE losers will stop using PNG's, but i won't!! :-D
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The slogan for Mortein - an insectacide - goes: "When you're on a good thing, stick to it!"[/i]
From True colors shine through (http://rss.com.com/2100-1023_3-234014.html?tag=rn): . . . Without PNG, graphics appear differently and in different shades of color on screens of different kinds of computers: PCs, Macintosh, or Unix workstations. With PNG, files can be seen as intended on various machines.
PNG files average about 30 percent smaller than equivalent GIF files and can download faster to a user's screen. "The image comes sharper much more quickly, and not with that stretched appearance," Lilley said. As a result, a PNG viewer gets a first preview of an image with one sixty-fourth of the data downloaded, compared with only one-eighth for a GIF file.
PNG supports colour depths right on up to 24Bit (maybe even 32Bit?), while GIF's limitation is 8Bit!
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we used it on Children of DUNE
That show is fantastic and so was the first Dune series. The special effects are very nice, thats the kinda stuff i eventually wanna be able to do.
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GIF is having a slow death. And that will come from its inefficient proprietary architecture that prohibits any real future improvement and its inability to enthuse the mobile and multimedia industry. So long it has survived due to both web authors' and M$ Internet XXXPlorer's incompetence.
CNET is a lame site. If you want biased reports it's a good start. You can do a lot better if you are interested in computers and technology.
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I use PNG all the time. It's my favourite image format for web graphics. I am really hoping it doesn't die out. Or at least mozilla and other browsers continue to support it for the sake of the few that do use it. Alpha transparency effects rock :-)
As for Ogg Vorbis, that might do well when hardware starts supporting it... Check this out:
Ogg officially official; Vorbis finding its way into hardware players (http://arstechnica.com/archive/news/1054715289.html) (Arstechnica)
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It´s so stupid that i can´t think of a good comment to make. PNG won´t die so easy as someMicrosoftcheerleaders at cnet wan´t.
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That show is fantastic and so was the first Dune series. The special effects are very nice, thats the kinda stuff i eventually wanna be able to do.
thanks. area51 did all the worm stuff. among other things i did Leto doing his super-worm speed. especially the last nite's final fight.
good luck and keep using those PNG'!
:-D
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PNG's rock because their not 256 color limited... but sadly suck because IE dosent render them properly and until IE does nobody is gonna really push the PNG.
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What I really like is the spin Unisys is putting on their behaviour:
But Unisys credited its exertion of the LZW patent with the creation of the PNG format, and whatever improvements the newer technology brought to bear.
"We haven't evaluated the new recommendation for PNG, and it remains to be seen whether the new version will have an effect on the use of GIF images," said Unisys representative Kristine Grow. "If so, the patent situation will have achieved its purpose, which is to advance technological innovation. So we applaud that."
Corporate sleaze at its best :-D
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spin Unisys is putting on their behaviour
I'll second that
(lets leverage all patents and sue all violators, hopefully this will spur innovation)
Didnt realize the amount of crack-smokers in the IT industry
BTW: I use TIFF RAW and PNG (not that it matters)
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IIRC PNG support up to 48 bit.
PNG compresses thing a bit better than GIF.
Oh yeah, PNG is lossless.. I love PNG...
IIRC one of the first browser to support PNG was an amiga browser.
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Have to admit, I tend to use the format that gives me the best image quality-to-size. If GIF can give me the same quality of image as PNG in a smaller format then I will use GIF. Same with Jpeg-PNG and JPEG-GIF.
But I do like PNG as it has the true colour ability+Aplha channel and is loseless.
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The article was complete and utter crap! Don't believe a word it says. It was written by someone who thinks "check the facts" means finding out what the letters in LZW stands for.
Png is a very popular format. It's the choice of the vast majority of the Gimp, PhotoShop and varius raytracer apps users.
Png is a format that supports 8-bit, 24-bit, and 48-bit graphics (plus alpha-channel). And it supports color profiles and lot's of other goodies. Gif on the other hand have nearly no features at all, except perhaps for animation and
only support 8-bit graphics.
Png is so feature rich that the jpeg group responded with the jpeg2 standard which was the greatest graphics format failure until this date (AFAIK). Chances are that you have never even heard of jp2 (or j2p, etc). Jpeg2 is however quite nice; vastly enhanced "lossy" image quality
and support for color profiles and loss-less saving. If people knew it existed png would be in big trouble :-)
Btw, png works just fine with the latest browsers (even Internet Exploder).
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PNG wasn't designed to replace GIF anyway.
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PNGs are difficult to work with properly. Most software packages have lame PNG save support. Photoshop offers awful compression, to the point where getting a PNG as small as a GIF, or even close, is a very rare sight. I always wondered what the hype was over PNGs being smaller than GIFs. I almost never see that happen.
Gamma is a requirement, rather than an option, so PNGs show up in different brightnesses on every machine. I remember the early days of PNG where every time you saved your picture, it would keep getting darker and darker until it was black. You can only fix this by calibrating your machine, not setting a flag when saving your PNGs.
The only use I have for PNG is archiving pictures. For anything else, especially images for the web, I only use GIF of JPEG. GIF offers the compression I need for low-color images, and a high-quality JPEG looks pretty good (and small) next to a PNG.
There's just no need for it if you know beans about preparing web graphics. You can't blame IE for everything. I use what works best, and GIF and JPEG are what works for me.
What would be really helpful is to make a standard that offers functionality that is actually useful. Gamma is a start, but I'd like to see more formats with actual measurement and resolution settings, so I can define my documents in inches/centimeters, rather than pixels. JPEG offers this with metadata, which can be very unreliable with many software packages (such as the horrible Kodak DLS minilab I use at work). Anyone serious about press work uses TIFF files, which have no compression at all. I don't know how these people survive. :-o
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Waccoon wrote:
...so I can define my documents in inches/centimeters...
So how big is my monitor, how do I have it adjusted, and what resolution am I in?
Don't know? So how can you POSSIBLY define the image in inches/centimetres without the program displaying it (in this case, a webbrowser) supporting some kind of feedback from the rest of the system (which would also suck badly since things measured in inches/cm wouldn't be resized when changing res and everything else would). Quite frankly, it annoys the hell out of me when software attempts to tell me the "size" of something in inches or centimetres. It really means nothing at all without some kind of manual caibration first (like GIMP does on initial setup (which I still don't use because I don't like it))
Overall, a pixel size feels more "natural" than inches/centimetres since I know how it's going to look in relation to other things with pixel sizes (such as font size) which is what really counts (I don't care how big my graphics appear on someone's screen, as long as the appear the right size in relation to everything else there!)
Regards,
Ben de Waal
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@YttriumOx:
Um, you don't do any printing, do you?
Pixels are natural for games and web graphics, not for anything else. How many pixels are on a sheet of paper? ;-)
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"W3C Proposed Recommendation 1 October 1996, revised 20 May 2003":
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/PR-PNG-20030520/ (http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/PR-PNG-20030520/)