Graphics Tips and Techniques

SUNDBSYS Only

One thing to keep in mind is that images hold a lot of information. Therefore they take up a lot of disk space, and they take time to read, uncompress and display. Still, there are a few considerations that may dramatically improve the performance of the IMAGE instruction.

Keep Images Small

The physical size of the image has the greatest impact on performance. While a person's picture may look better at 640x480x256, if you only need to recognize them, 320x240x256 should be sufficient. An image using the later resolution will display in about one-fourth the time.

Low DPI Scans

Similarly, most of the time you do not need to scan a document at 300dpi. Standard fax resolution is 96 dpi, and that is adequate for most situations. If you must save the image at the highest resolution, it will take longer to display.

Cautions

The TIF graphics format is very complex and has many different types of data imbedded within it. The SUNIMAGE software at this time only supports color uncompressed or runlength encoded (packed bits). This means that some of the scanners that generate TIF files of documents may not display the image at all or give indeterminate results.

This addon was for SUNDBSYS only and is now obsolete.

See Also: Graphic Output Instructions