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tias@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day agoIt’s really only helpful for formats that will be directly read by hardware (the video chip) and where the “compression” ratio (I would prefer the term quantization) needs to be fixed. For file compression, which was quite mature but CPU- and memory-intensive at the time, the dithering only makes it more difficult to compress further.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
What do you mean “at the time”?
What time are you talking about?
tias@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
At the time when dithering was commonly used to achieve the illusion of more available colors, i.e. the 80s and the first half of the 90s.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I’m not really convinced that file compression was “mature” at the time. Text compression was reasonable progressed but image compression was created for a reason besides just a requirement for fixed compression ratio.
But I do agree that it was limited in it’s usefulness.
tias@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
I’m thinking of file compressoin formats like Zip, LHA and ARJ, which would work particularly well if the image was not dithered and used run-length encoding (e.g. the PIC format of the Atari ST). The PNG format still uses the deflate algorithm which is essentially identical to the compression used by PKZip in 1991.