Talk:Raster graphics

message: Should the article link to halftone printing as a halftone print is essentially composed of dots, an analog raster image. Scoo 09:43, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Analog raster graphics

message: Note the following passage in the raster graphics article:
:Raster graphics deal more practically than vector graphics with photographs and photo-realistic images . . . . [Italics added]
The article does not explain this greater practicality.  Reading the voctor graphics article, one is impressed with the use of vector graphics in producing sharper images.  So, one wonders why bother with raster graphics.  Furthermore, one notices that Paint Shop Pro handles raster graphics, while Photoshop does not.  What does Corel know that Adobe does not, or vice versa? Dogru144 16:27, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Speaking of analog photos, which type of graphic editing (raster or vector) is better?  Cheers, Dogru144 16:27, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Better explanation of value of raster graphics, contrasted with [[vector graphics]]

message: It'd be great if mention or links could be made to some formats e.g. GIF, JPEG, & BMP.
Any others?
Regards
JohnI 22:54, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. I just added visible links to two other pages that cover that. We definately don't want this article to turn into a looooong list of graphics file formats. --Kubanczyk 07:50, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mention of Some Formats? 

message: I have reverted wholesale spelling changes on this article enough, so someone else feel free to do it instead.  From now on I'm just going to keep it consistent one spelling or the other. VMS Mosaic 17:51, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  color/colour 

message: Is there notable examples of raster graphics, which are not bitmap in the sense of that article? (Do not confuse it with binary image which is a separate article.)
May be, so named analog raster graphics? But such unquantized things as analog video are not commonly referred as raster graphics, and may be noted as See also.
I propose to merge the article “bitmap” here, and move bitmap (disambiguation) to bitmap, see Talk:Bitmap#What concept is the article about?. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 12:50, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I have to agree. Besides, they are in a sense one and the same. Adam Hillman (talk) 12:12, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merging “bitmap”? 

message: I have no dog in this fight, but I’m curious why JohnnyMrNinja merged the "Bitmap" article into here even though there seems to be more opposition than support for such a merger. [edit: in the previous section] –jacobolus (t) 10:14, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd have participated in the "fight" myself, but I lost the keys to my time machine. The debate is about the article in June 2009, which was about both bitmap file formats in general (i.e. raster graphics) and the Bitmap file format. The latter was later split off into its own article, leaving the two pages completely redundant. Thanks for the vote of confidence. ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 10:29, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text:  Ah, fair point. I didn’t look as closely as I should have. Well, it should probably be put to another discussion then. I moved this to a new section. Does anyone have a high-level vision for how these pages should ideally be organized? Does a merger, now in 2011, seem like a good idea to people? –jacobolus (t) 11:50, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm still going for yes on this one, the current version is a complete overlap. ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 06:52, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed! Should be one. -rjdthegreat   — Preceding undated comment added 21:01, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge bitmap into here? 

message: It would be easier for users to find the articles if they were merged, but I notice they both talk abount different things at some points. If the Raster Image article were to be cleaned up a bit, then merging could definitely be a possibility. talk 18:18, 25 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Hmmm...

message: I doubt that the rastrum theory is correct. I would like to see a source for it. In Dutch, "rooster" means grid, and this word sounds similar to raster.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rooster#Dutch
Xiutwel 13:52, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  etymology 

message: As the original creator of a small article on Raster data, I'm OK with merging it into this article, so long as readers are able to find a distinct discussion of the former (actually broader!) topic.
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Ldecola (talk • contribs) 15:59, 9 April 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Klbrain (talk) 20:36, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge proposal

message: I made a fairly heavy revision of lead this morning. As usual, my work is along the lines of a suggested treatment, I make my contribution and move along, taking no further possession of the end result. Revise or revert as you wish. But do note that I've substantially increased the subject matter coverage, and my revised lead certainly summarizes far better than the pre-existing material. — MaxEnt 18:30, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fairly edit rework of lead 

message: For the record, after contemplating my recent edit (previous comment), I strongly oppose the merge proposal from a decade ago. 
This becomes a lot more obvious after I added the footnote to mechanical television at the bottom of the revised lead. 
I was there in the late seventies/early eighties, and bitmapped graphics did not become a thing until around 1982, with the entry of the "affordable" Hercules Graphics Card in the IBM PC expansion market at USD $499 ($1350 inflation adjusted to 2020). Note that this was just the card, and did not include the monitor. Before that you only had the subsidized workstation crowd—aka the prima dona X-window hacker community at MIT—loudly demanding megapixel bit-mapped screens, and $250,000 futuristic concept cars at Xerox Parc (which I personally once got to fool around with for a solid hour). Then you had the Apple Lisa in 1982, another grotesquely overpriced concept car, before the "affordable" Macintosh from 1984 which brought bit-mapped graphics into the mainstream once and for all at a lush, monochromatic 72 dpi on white phosphor (not even having any other possible display mode). 
Rasterization is any process which decomposed multidimensional objects into a series of parallel ribbons. If the object has an inherent visual nature, then it's almost surely two dimensional, and we lump this together as raster graphics.  
In the electro-mechanical world that long predates the above (1920s for mechanical television) of central engineering concern is registration: decomposing the image with a known registration, and maintaining that registration within tight tolerances when putting the image back together again. What does not matter is whether the lines are drawn left to right or right to left, whether the continuous or discrete "pixels" have any particular local geometry (they can be dots, squares, blobs), and or sequence of iteration in which the ribbons are first acquired or later laid down (analog television has long been interlaced). Within each ribbon, you have a linear offset, x, and a function (determined by recorded data values) that maps 'x onto some form of intensity; this need not be a visual intensity as such, but might instead be an applied tip force. 
We rasterize image data when building electromechanical systems for much the same reason that spoken language is highly serialized. You have one production element (the beam, or pen, or throat) to cover the desired output space of whatever conceptual dimension it might have. (Note that true visual sign languages are more concurrent that spoken language—both arms and the face annotate in parallel—but still highly serialized.) 
x can be viewed as distance, but more often in equipment it is best viewed as time. CRT tubes ideally obtain a constant horizontal scan velocity across the projected surface (which has not always been a plane). 
CRT displays would display with less flicker if the scan lines alternated direction (less time spent in horizontal retrace), but then you would have a severe registration problem between the two directions so this was never done. Eventually dot matrix printers would print bidirectionally to save time, I'm not sure how they finally solved the registration problem. 
For similar reasons, the reproduction process is almost always highly regularized: constant scan velocity, constant ribbon thickness, and a highly regular scan line display order (if not perfect top to bottom). 
Once memory becomes cheap enough (aka DRAM) everything rasterized is reinvented as bitmapped for the convenience of digital technology. The Macintosh's 512x342 monochrome bitmap required 22 KB of memory. The original edition had 128 KB in total (I believe the graphics used the same system bus and was allocated precisely every second clock cycle, but this is long ago). What really made this the beginning of bitmapped graphics in a real way was that the Mac provided an implementation of bit blit in ROM (as I recall, code from the ROM ran faster than code from RAM, but I forget the precise reason why). I recall that codifying bit blit in this was originally a Xerox Parc innovation, from whom Jobs borrowstole a great deal of his original IP. 
Meanwhile, monochrome text adapters continued to exist for a long time. These are extremely rasterized, but with the rasterization performed by hardware in real time for every scan line generated (your character ROM chips work pretty darn hard). I would not call the character text array "bit mapped". (On IBM it was traditionally 25×80×2 with bits in the second byte used to control inverse video and blink and other hell spawn.) Nevertheless, text mode was indeed rasterized on display. 
If a bitmap is used to represent a mechanically uniform grid, it rasterizes naturally for the needs of most available hardware. As Marc Andreessen once said, software eventually eats everything, to such a degree that some people suppose that raster graphics has now become a subset of bitmapped graphics. These people are prone to hum along to the following ditty: 
  we don't need no registration
  we don't need no scan control
only they probably have their screen set up to display that in Helvetica, rather than monospace as God intended. 
Bitmapped graphics are a technical implementation of raster graphics that took the world by storm in the early 1980s, and which immediately then developed a large, cite-worthy specialist literature. Guess which article has the better citation standard? (If only I could get my hands on more past editions of Linotype Weekly I might even stand a fighting chance in the citation wars.) 
Quite clearly, bitmapped has its origins in raster graphics, but the vast majority of modern file formats derive far more directly from bitmapped graphics than from their raster heritage (although traditional conventions regarding raster bit layout yet remain). 
Once we get to the era of the LCD display panel, the era of rasterization is largely ended. 
If you disagree, take a quick browse through DisplayPort Technical Overview. Way beyond rasterization, the image is sliced and diced during compression with a Ginsu knife. (The name Ginsu was invented by Becher; Becher later translated the word as meaning "I never have to work again".) 
A few final notes: dot matrix and inkjet printers perform simultaneous rasterization of many image rows; scanning electron microscopes rasterize (but not visually until false colored). 
Maybe the solution is to create a page titled raster graphics electromechanical reproduction to cover decades worth of legacy peripheral devices where this was a mandatory interface, turn raster graphics itself into a largely historical treatment (at least as far back as mechanical television) and push everything else into bitmapped graphics (where I would further separate out bitmapped graphics file formats, lest these drown everything else). 
Unfortunately, I'm not as blessed as the Ginsu guy, and I've already devoted far more time to this than intended so I must toss my message in a bottle into the vast talk-page ocean and then transubstantiate myself into the sunset. — MaxEnt 21:18, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  We don't need no registration, we don't need no scan control 

message: I did a fairly substantial revision of this page, trying to reorganize it into a more standard page layout. The intro had grown rather messy, so I moved a lot of it into more expansive sections below. It is not perfect, and could use more work, but I hope it is an improvement.
On the discussion above about bitmap vs. raster, yes there is a subtle distinction, and much of the discussion above should be in the page itself rather than here, but the fact is that they are commonly used interchangeably in most fields, and they belong on the same page. Bplewe (talk) 17:00, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: Revision