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GIFs use LZW compression, which is the part that was patented. I think the main problem is that the dithering necessary to make 256 colors look good introduces
by mcbits 9y ago
GIFs use LZW compression, which is the part that was patented. I think the main problem is that the dithering necessary to make 256 colors look good introduces a lot of high-frequency noise, making the compression less effective.
- microcolonel 9y agoOh boy, I don't know how I got the impression that it was RLE. Maybe I was mixing it up with older versions of Targa. Yeah, the noise was more the point I was getting at. IIRC PNG also has the benefit of prefilters which allow it to (and maybe there are other things) compress rectangles as contiguous symbols rather than splitting them across lines, which makes obvious sense for 2D images.