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 dithering was limited in it’s usefulness.
My point was just that dithering existed in print media, so it was one of the first ways they used to reduce image size, they just copied over the same technique
I’m thinking of file compression 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.
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 dithering was limited in it’s usefulness.
My point was just that dithering existed in print media, so it was one of the first ways they used to reduce image size, they just copied over the same technique
I’m thinking of file compression 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.