Does MrSID work with color classified or indexed imagery?
Yes it does. MrSID will expand the image back to 24-bit during the compression process and then compress it. Many customers use color-classified (indexed) images saved using LZW compression. Since the color-classified images have 256 (or less) colors, LZW compression can take, for example, a 35Mb TIFF file down to 4Mb. What people forget, however, is that LZW compression (and JPEG for that matter) requires you to open the whole file into memory to display it. Opening it in applications like PhotoShop or ArcView will take time because of this issue. MrSID not only lets you compress this same image down all the way to less than a Mb, but it also maintains the image quality, gives you multi-resolution browsing (down to the original scan resolution), and also opens it instantaneously. Our recommendation: when you produce a digital version of your source data, do so at the highest resolution and color depth possible. This is often contradictory to standard practice in making digital represe
