Monday 3 November 2008

The impact of evolving output media on the design and creation of graphic images

The overall impact of evolving output media on the design and creation of graphic images can only be a good thing. The new technologies involved in creating and viewing graphic images mean that images today are much more clear and life-like. The introduction of "next-gen" gaming meant output media needed to stay one step ahead, monitors have always had the capabilities to play whatever you can throw at them, but the last few generations of monitor have concentrated on size and price, meaning the next-gen gamers werent getting the quality of images console gamers got on TVs. In the last few years however, monitors have been made with picture quality first, this has kept them one step ahead of TVs, not just in price, but quality.
Printers have always been expensive if you wanted to get the kind of picture your happy with. The prices would jump massivly for a short increase in quality, so if people wanted real quality the only option was to get them printed elsewhere, usually their local library. Printer quality has always been there, but the last generation has seen printers evolve into a scanner, colour copier and a fax machine all in one. This is great if you happen to need all of those features, if not then you will find yourself paying the same amount for just the printer of the same quality. With all these new features comes a new, much more advanced way of using it. The options to you are endless, but only if you can get it working atall. All this means The design and creation of graphic images is left to the side, and it seems the only issue is price.

File size and image quality changes

Vector Images (.DXF) are made using mathematics, angles, percentages etc. instead of pixels. This means the file size of a vector image is much less than the file size of a jpeg image. This also means because the mathematics dont change with larger images the image keeps its quality when resized.


Vector Image:




Although this image is saved a a Gif you can still see how mathematics are used to create the image, meaning it can be resized without the loss of quality.
Jpeg images:

As you can see when left at the correct size Jpeg images are much more detailed than vector images, but when resized most of the quality is lost.


Compression techniques such as WinZip will compress the file to make it as small as possible. When unzipped the image will be the same file size as it was originally and still have its original charactoristics.
Image resolution is the overall detail level in the image, because .DXF is a vector image the overall image detail is not as high as it would be if it was a jpeg. The colour depth of an image is the bits per pixel, the more bits in a pixel the more colours are available to make the image more lefe-like. Vector images dont use pixels so this doesnt come into effect untill the image is pinted, and then its down to the printer defaults.