At the same time I just made a PNG with Photoshop and saved it at 6.82KB and then coverted to GIF which saved at 2.97KB.
Yes, you're right, the thing is it is highly dependant on the settings. I don't know or Photoshop handles it, but in GIMP there is a "compression level" slider, the more I increase the compression (which is lossless) the smaller the image becomes. Also, you can index png just like you can gif. I created a black image (256x256) it was 328bytes, then I indexed it to 2 colors and it dropped to 156bytes. Then playing with a few more png settings I reduced it to 103bytes. Using gif the smallest I could get it was 384bytes. Why? Because the bit depth of a gif is ALWAYS 8 bits (256 colors). Where as, with png, since the image was just one color, I reduced the bit depth to 1 bit (2 colors). So the savings is signifigant when using png for simple images that use less than 256 colors.
For the record I didn't follow the links provided because it's obvious that you wouldn't provide anything contrary to what you mentioned but what Yale University (where-ever that is) finds as a result of some experiment is clearly not being used in practice.
Well there is a reason why I didn't provide any evidence to the contrary... I couldn't find any! I found _one_ site (which I could only find cached on google, because the site itself is gone)
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:R6I...mp;amp;ie=UTF-8 Where they mentioned _one_ specific (and very rare) case where a gif will be smaller than a png. That was the only evidence I could find that said a gif could be better than png. Every organization I could find said use png, not gif. The only other cases I can find where people say png is larger than gif is when you are using a 24bit png image (true color) but of course it is obvious that a png storing 24bit information (which most pngs on the web do not) will be larger, so I didn't consider that a weakness since gif can't even support 24bit color. If you can find me evidence to the contrary, I'll gladly read through it, but I could not find any on my own. When I search google for "gif smaller than png" "gif better compression than png" "image format comparison" "png jpg gif" all I find is people reporting how much better png is than gif and jpg. Oh and Yale University is an Ivy League school that is probably in the top 10 universities in the US and probably in the top 25 in the world.
In light of this, I visited my own sites plus the two you own and there are GIF files a-plenty and 0% PNGs that I happened to have seen
Well I own more than 2 sites. If you look at solarstats.net you'll notice that all except 2 images are png (and those two images will be converted within the next couple of days). codemastr.com has 3 images (which is hardly files a-plenty) 2 of which are gif's, those will also be converted in the next few days. The only site you could have been referring to would be unrealircd.com, and I'm not the webmaster of that site. If I were, it would all be png by now. Oh and the only reason the pics on codematr.com are gif was because at the time, my png plugin for GIMP wasn't working so I couldn't create a png image, I've since fixed the problem or else it would have always been png.
