Super Compressed Bitmaps

(Document/Medical only) Super compressed bitmaps are kept compressed in memory. Only 24-bit or 1-bit bitmaps can be kept super compressed. The memory requirements for super compressed bitmaps are greatly reduced compared to uncompressed bitmaps or RLE-compressed bitmaps.

The data access for super compressed bitmaps is usually slower, compared to uncompressed bitmaps. The compression used for 24-bit bitmaps is lossy, which means multiple changes to the bitmap can produce some visual loss.

The data access is usually slower for super compressed bitmaps, but there are situations in which the data access is faster than for uncompressed bitmaps. When dealing with very large bitmaps, the O/S might swap to disk the bitmap data. In this case, the access for uncompressed bitmaps can be a lot slower than for super compressed bitmaps.

Any application that deals with large bitmaps of tens or hundreds of MB should consider using super compressed bitmaps.

The BitmapCompression property can be read to determine the current bitmap's current compression. Setting this property will change the compression of the bitmap to super compress 1-bit or 24-bit bitmaps, as well as, uncompress bitmaps and compress 1-bit bitmaps using RLE compression.

The size of the bitmap, in bytes, can be determined by reading the BitmapSize property.