It explains the "grainy-ness" I was seeing. I just want to know: "Why?" Wouldn't JPEG be a better option or even PNG?

Just wondering, not complaining.

Because .pngs can be very large and load very very slowly. Not bandwidth friendly nor download friendly for users.

.jpg also degrades quality.

.gif does some, but when it comes to comics, gif is better than .jpg as .jpg is really geared towards photography.

.gif also allows for transparency. While .png does the same, it does not always work in Internet Explorer....at least these would be my assumptions for why they use .gif

Yes, PNGs tend to be larger, but I thought jpegs would actually raise the quality, rather than lower it, since it displays many more colors than gif's 256.

gif is actually great for artistic things. in fact, it's often a high choice for the more talented GFX (graphics such as sigs, avatars, wallpapers) creators. its true it causes grain, but that adds to the look of it IMO. jpeg... is horrible. i despise it. far too often it kills quality BADLY. png is very nice but tends to be much MUCH larger file size than gif. up to 5 times, from what i've seen.

My eyes may not be as discriminate as others, but I don't exactly see where the comics are that grainy, aside from where they're supposed to be. But, that could be just me.

More colors doesn't always make for better images. Web browsers render jpegs at 72 dpi, so a jpeg that is not created at that resolution will incur some quality loss. There are also some differences in file compression between jpeg and gif. GIF starts out smaller right out of the box and allows the artist to choose which colors to include on the palette. JPEGs start out with millions and millions of colors and then filter out which colors aren't needed during compression. If you compress the JPEG too much, I believe it can lead to dithering which essentially destroys the quality of the JPEG. Honestly, as LFG shows us, there's not much you can't do with 256 colors since the differences between the basic 256 and the colors added by 24 or 32 bit RGB jpegs are barely discernible to the human eye.

/web geek off

Dor: I've always noticed it... >>
(Then again, I'm an artist. I notice everything. People tend to look at you funny when you stare at their arms for over 5 minutes. XD)

In any case, I just never knew the grain was because it was a gif. I just thought Lar was being niffty. If you compare the print version to the web version, though, the difference becomes a bit more apparent.

Kal: Hmmm... I sees. Thanks for that. ^^ I guess it's still a bit subjective, too.

I know Jpeg is definately bad, I frequent the motivator poster thread and photobucket converts any of my images to jpeg instead of bitmap (yeah, i use paint). Whenever Jpeg is used it degrades the quality REALLY badly. GIF is usually better for cartoony images anyway