A Wired.com user account lets you create, edit and comment on Webmonkey articles. You will also be able to contribute to the Wired How-To Wiki and comment on news stories at Wired.com.
It's fast and free.
processing...Retrieve Sign In
Please enter your e-mail address or username below. Your username and password will be sent to the e-mail address you provided us.
processing...Welcome to Webmonkey
- edit articles
- add to the code library
- design and write a tutorial
- comment on any Webmonkey article
Sign In Information Sent
Bitmap
/skill level/
/viewed/
A bitmap is a mapped array of pixels that can be saved as a file.
Both JPEG and GIF are bitmap graphic formats. Currently, the only other way to store an image is as a vector graphic. You can't easily scale bitmap images, but you can control every single pixel and thus achieve many effects impossible in vector graphics. Conversely, vector formats offer advantages of scalability and lower bandwidth requirements. When you compress a bitmapped image, you suck out some of the visual information.
To bypass this, the portable network graphics format (or PNG, pronounced "ping") was designed to store a single bitmap image for transmittal over computer networks without losing this data.
Back to Glossary
- This page was last modified 01:14, 15 May 2008.
/related_articles/
Special Offer For Webmonkey Users
WIRED magazine:
The first word on how technology is changing our world.