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From: marmoset@ub.cc.umich.edu (Dave Walker)
Newsgroups: alt.graphics.pixutils,comp.graphics
Subject: Re: Time to upgrade the GIF standard ?
Message-ID: <1990Jul27.212235.7724@caen.engin.umich.edu>
Date: 27 Jul 90 21:22:35 GMT
References: <OTTO.90Jul27095755@tukki.jyu.fi>
Sender: news@caen.engin.umich.edu (CAEN Netnews)
Organization: Marmoset Design, Ltd.
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In article <OTTO.90Jul27095755@tukki.jyu.fi> otto@tukki.jyu.fi (Otto J. 
Makela) writes:
> * define better color coding - for some reason, GIFs made on a Macintosh
>   tend to come out a lot darker on a PC (this could be a problem with the
>   Mac software, but I suspect that it's something more esoteric like the
>   color characteristics of a Mac display/display card vs. a PC VGA)

Actually this problem is caused more so by differences in monitors. The 
Sony Trinitron monitors which dominate the Mac market are far brighter than 
most VGA and SuperVGA monitors, hence the differences in the images.  
Differences between monitors (and printed colors too) are the sort of 
things that make color desktop publishing so difficult.  There are a 
number of different solutions that have been postulated to get around 
these color incompatibilities, but nothing really simple and convenient 
has popped up yet.  It's pretty hard to globally correct colors when two 
different monitors from the same manufacturer (sometimes even the same
model), for instance, may have wildly different color ranges.

I think the next GIF standard should, at bare minimum, support 24-bitplane 
images, pixel-size information, and possible support for other color 
models (HSB, CMYK). 

 Another enhancement I'd like to see would be an option to include a 
"thumbnail" image, i.e. a miniature representation of the image in the 
file (maybe 64X64 or something) which could be used for quickly previewing 
a bunch of images, or for maintaining a pictorial database of your GIF 
images.

> These are the main points that come to mind.  Comments, anyone ?

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| Dave Walker, Marmoset Design Ltd.                                      |
| marmoset@ub.cc.umich.edu                 "I don't read, I just guess"  |
| marmoset@mondo.engin.umich.edu       -Happy Mondays, "Wrote For Luck"  |
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