Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: teler@cs.huji.ac.il (Eyal Teler) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: FastJPEG, version 1.0 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.graphics Date: 2 Mar 1994 16:35:25 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 141 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <2l2f8e$po9@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: teler@cs.huji.ac.il (Eyal Teler) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: graphics, viewer, JPEG, freeware PRODUCT NAME FastJPEG, version 1.0 BRIEF DESCRIPTION JPEG viewer, with ECS (HAM) and AGA (HAM8) versions. This program was provided on the coverdisk of Amiga Computing Magazine, issue 71, March 1994. See my review of this magazine elsewhere in the comp.sys.amiga.reviews archives. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Christoph Feck Address: TowerSystems Balbierstrasse 6 D-67663 Kaiserslauten Germany E-mail: feck@informatik.uni-kl.de LIST PRICE Freeware SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE The AGA chipset and a 68020 or higher CPU are needed for the AGA version. ;-) The program will work with the old graphics chip set (OCS), contrary to what the magazine claims. SOFTWARE Workbench 2.0 or higher recommended, but not necessary. Some features are missing when working with 1.3 - pictures larger than the screen cannot be fully displayed (they scroll with 2.0) and wildcards cannot be used in command line. COPY PROTECTION None. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 500, 1MB Chip RAM, 2MB Fast RAM, OCS Kickstart 1.2, Workbench 1.3, ARP Fujitsu 100MB SCSI drive in A590 INSTALLATION Just copy your desired version to where you want it (it has an icon you can drag). REVIEW What can I say? It's a JPEG viewer, and it's quite fast. The picture quality is also not bad. I tested FastJPEG with a few pictures and was quite satisfied with its output. It does dithering, and in interlaced mode it halves the width of the picture and applies smoothing. The results are usually good, although not as good as a dedicated picture converter could achieve. Here are some timings I took. The pictures were all loaded from the RAM: disk. The timings are for a 7MHz 68000, of course. Picture size Time (minutes:seconds, timed with my watch) -------------------------------------------------------------------- 276x212 0:28 415x473 1:04 646x737 2:45 (picture not fully displayed) DOCUMENTATION Quite a lot of documentation for such a small program. There's very little you really need to know, but it's all described in detail. LIKES AND DISLIKES I like the speed and quality. This is a very useful program for checking out JPEGs. I didn't like that some features were not available on my 1.3 machine, but I see this as my fault for not upgrading. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS The JPEG viewer I had before, VJPEG, is almost four times the size of FastJPEG, and takes more than four times longer to display a picture. The quality of pictures from FastJPEG is also usually better, because of the dithering. This is why VJPEG is no longer on my hard disk, and FastJPEG is. BUGS None that I could find, not that I tried to find any. VENDOR SUPPORT I understand that this program is continually updated. I didn't try to contact the programmer. WARRANTY Coverdisk replacement by the magazine. CONCLUSIONS If you collect pictures, and need some way to view JPEGs before you convert them, then look no further than this program. I give FastJPEG 9 out of 10. COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1994 Eyal Teler. All rights reserved. --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews