"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> I really haven't looked into graphics file formats in a long time, so I'll just
> ask this and see what happens.  ;)
>
> What about BMP or GIF?
> I also never see anyone use RAW file formats - except for professional
> photographers, and it seems a bit --- complex.

RAW is technically useless (at least not beneficial). In a digital camera, RAW
formats store the exact information received by the sensor. Then, the image is
simulated from the lights sensed by the sensor.

POV-Ray simulates the color of each pixel by ray tracing. For this reason,
POV-Ray has dropped supporting RAW.

BMP like PPM and TGA is a binary map of pixels (bitmap). PNG has the same
information (almost) but with better size management and zip-compression (not
affecting the information stored).

The best format (in terms of size and accuracy) is PNG.

Of course, POV-Ray is not slow in producing PNG. As I tested, converting an
uncompressed format to PNG takes the same time. As Bill correctly mentioned,
POV-Ray uses other libraries for producing each image format.

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