Subject: SURVEY: Amiga picture viewers
From: [email-masked] (Osma Ahvenlampi)
Date: 23 Feb 1994 17:45:49 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

PRODUCT NAMES

	FastJPEG 1.08,	by Christoph Feck
	Mostra   2.0,	by Sebastiano Vigna
	PPShow   4.0,	by Nico Francois and Rafael D'Halleweyn
	ShowGIF  1.01,	by Christophe Passuello
	Viewtek  1.05,	by Thomas Krehbiel

	At the time of this writing, FastJPEG 1.08 was still in the beta
test stage, and thus not publicly available.

	[MODERATOR'S NOTE:  This review was updated on Feb 23, 1994.
	Search for the text "[UPDATE:" to find updated information.
	-Dan]

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

	These are all picture viewers for the Amiga.  They are compared
for speed and picture quality on IFF, GIF, and JPEG images.  Not all the
viewers support all these image file formats.

AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION

	All the programs except FastJPEG 1.08 are available on the Aminet
ftp sites:

FastJPEG_1.0.lha     gfx/show    33K+JPEG viewer with dithering for ECS/AGA
Mostra2.lha          gfx/show    53K+Shareware ILBM viewer, supports 2.0 & 3.0
PPShow40.lha         gfx/show    79K+ILBM/ANIM/GIF/JPEG/DataTypes viewer
Viewtek.lha          fish/ff903  66K+JPEG/GIF/IFF viewer. V1.05
FastGIF2.08.lha      gfx/show   151K+* Newest version (2.08) of FastGIF (21 Jun

	[UPDATE:  Note that ShowGIF 1.01 is the CLI version of FastGIF 2.08.
	- Dan]

LIST PRICE

	All programs are freeware or shareware.

MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

	Amiga 500, 7.09 MHz 68010 CPU
	1MB Chip RAM, 2MB Fast RAM

ABOUT THE TESTS

	After getting the new PPShow 4.0, I decided to do a few tests of the
various picture viewers available.  The file formats tested are:

	JPEG - 24bit color JPEG. I didn't have any greyscale pictures around.
	GIF  - 16 color and 256 color highres (~640x480) images
	IFF  - Highres interlaced 16 color, and lowres interlaced HAM6

NOTE: Only Viewtek and PPShow are capable of showing all these formats.
Mostra shows IFF only, ShowGIF GIF only, and FastJPEG JPEG only.

	I did not test IFF24, 8bit greyscale JPEG, HAM8, and other AGA modes.

IFF ILBM TESTS

	Three of the programs, PPShow, Mostra and Viewtek, support IFF.
PPShow was the fastest of them.  With 16 color highres/laced pictures,
Mostra was about 40% slower, and Viewtek about 70% slower than PPShow..
With lowres/laced HAM pictures, Mostra was about 20% slower than PPShow,
while Viewtek was 230% slower!

GIF TESTS

	Viewtek, ShowGIF, and PPShow can display GIF pictures. Of the three,
ShowGIF was clearly fastest.  With 16 color highres GIFs, PPShow was about
90% slower, while Viewtek was as much as 300% slower! All three programs
displayed the picture on a 16 color highres screen.  With 256 color
pictures, Viewtek was the only one of the programs capable of color output.
It did that by converting the picture to HAM for display. I could not get it
to display these pictures as greyscale on a 16 color screen at all. This is
what the other programs did.  This time, PPShow was 160% slower than
ShowGIF, while Viewtek took 760% more time to convert the picture to HAM
instead of greyscale.

JPEG TESTS

	JPEG format is supported by FastJPEG, PPShow, and Viewtek.  Picture
size and other variations seemed to have little effect on the relative speeds
of the viewers.  All three display 24bit color JPEGs by converting them to
HAM. All three also support HAM8, even though FastJPEG has a separate
version for that.  At least FastJPEG and Viewtek also support greyscale
(8bit) JPEGs, but I did not test the speed of those.  FastJPEG was the clear
winner in this league. Not only it was the fastest, but also had the best
display quality, especially noticeable in HAM6.  PPShow was about 20%
slower, Viewtek about 70% slower than FastJPEG.  PPShow had terrible
artifacting on vertical and diagonal lines with high contrast. FastJPEG, on
the other hand, produced crisp lines with fairly good anti-aliasing. Viewtek
output was something between these two.  FastJPEG has good dithering
routines, while both PPShow and Viewtek hardly seem to dither at all.

SUMMARY

	All times are in seconds.

	  IFF/16   IFF/HAM  GIF/16   GIF/256   JPEG/24
	  640x512  384x480  528x296  720x512   300x474	JPEG quality
FastJPEG    --	     --       --       --      42.4 s	good
ShowGIF     --	     --      4.6 s    15.4 s	 --	--
PPShow	   2.3 s    2.5 s    8.7 s    39.4 s   50.3 s	poor
Mostra	   3.2 s    2.9 s     --       --	 --	--
Viewtek    4.0 s    8.3 s   18.6 s   *132.2 s  72.2 s	fair

*) Viewtek was the only one of the programs that could produce color output
   of 256 color GIFs on ECS machines.  The time given is for that.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

	Tests made by Osma Ahvenlampi.
	This article is freely distributable through any channels.

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