Dear Alan,

<snip>
 I had written :

> >JPEG has positive points as well as negative points, why ignore
> >the positive ?

You (Alan Kong) replied :

>   I like JPEG. I use JPEG. A lot. But, for me personally, I prefer to output
> .png (PiNG) and then use my third-party software to convert the image to
> JPEG. I am free to experiment with the quality settings, as well as compare
> the JPEG output of Paint Shop Pro to CompuPic, in the search for the best
> result. It takes a matter of seconds (not hours or days) to convert a 1024w
> by 768h .png to JPEG of any quality, so I can check out a dozen image
> conversions very fast. However, if one chooses the wrong JPEG quality
> setting for (unofficial) POV-Ray output, there's not much they can do. You
> can't take an inferior image and make it better. For some people, we are
> talking anywhere from a few hours to a few days of rendering time that would
> be wasted.

<snip>

I do use PNG almost exclusively myself, then use third party tools to
convert/crop/rescale/... But there is a specific case where jpeg output might be
desirable :

Project :
The IMP (Internet Movie Project)

Characteristics :
- This project is distributed amongst many persons / many platforms.
- Output files are going to count in many thousands, maybe millions if you count
pre-renders, trashing some of it, error-correction game.

Business case :
Given the above characteristics integrating jpeg output to pov will bring the
following safeguards to our project (and possibly similar projects in the
future) :
- All platforms will get the exact same version of JPEG libraries, thus making
it for consistent output. If bad luck struck and a minor bug showed, it would
show everywhere, therefore it might not be as noticeable in the sequence of
images rendered by different platforms.
- JPEG settings will be chosen at POV level, thus reducing the risk of people
tweaking with them in external utilities - this will ensure better consistency
through out.
- When going for a render, it is not just a few images we are talking about, but
possibly hundreds in the one go. PNG could clog up disk space quickly, JPEG
would save the burden of disk space for much bigger renders.
- Implementing post scene commands could be an answer to the problem provided
such commands could be written in the same manner, which I believe is not the
case, for all platforms. Or maybe that is the way to go and implement different
ini files for different platforms, but we'd rather avoid that since JPEG can be
and has been integrated in some custom compile.
- On the large amount of files that will be generated, this will certainly save
us a bit of time, not much I would agree, but certainly some and everything
counts.

That's my own point of view and I appreciate others might not agree.
Cheers,
Al.

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