Rather than run a separate review on both ADPro and ImageFX, I think I'll
just cover them both at once.  As you'll see, except for one, tiny, critical
difference, ImageFX far outshines ADPro.

  First off, I haven't seen any other pic converter worth mentioning, and
I've tried quite a few.  HAMLab is a distant third.  The PD stuff is both
ridiculous and "dangerous".  Dangerous, in that people will use them to
convert the GIFs and JPEGs they come across, then upload the second-rate
results to their local bulletin boards, in general lowering the overall
quality of files in the Amiga kingdom. 

  When it comes to memory management, ImageFX just blows the doors off ADPro.
ADPro does the ol' "largest contiguous block" routine, and it sucks.  When I
had nine megs of mem I could convert just about any JPEG (the ultimate mem
hog) pic with ImageFX, but not with ADPro.  I've got 14 megs now, so I don't
worry about it, but having nine megs and still not being able to convert a
large JPEG pic was very frustrating.  But as long as you stay away from those
1750 x 1500's, you'll be okay.

  Time-wise, a slight edge to ImageFX.  They load and render about the same,
but ImageFX's scaling is about twice as fast as ADPro's.

  ADPro, remember, is just a pic converter; ImageFX's claim to fame is that
it's also a paint kit, can read scanners, and has an attached morphing kit.
As a paint kit, it's okay, certainly no DPaint.  You won't be able to, say,
remove that tiny blemish from the top of an otherwise perfect female breast,
but you can do rough stuff.  Don't have a clue about the scanner deal.  I
guess if it carries your scanner driver, that saves you some bucks in scanner
software.  The morphing program is CineMorph, a pretty decent morph kit,
second only to ADPro's sister, MorphPlus.

  One of the nicest things about both converters is the crop-visual option.
Once again, ImageFX nudges out ADPro, and if you've got a 68000, it's a semi-
serious difference.  ImageFX just pops the sizeable window border around the
black & white "preview" pic; ADPro has to render it to black & white on the
spot.  It's much quicker than rendering it in color, of course, but it still
takes, oh, a minute or so.  I love to crop pics visually, so getting rid of
that wait was the one single thing I appreciated most about my accelerator.

  And speaking of accelerators, if you have an 030 or 040, you can use virtual
mem, which, although slow, is definitely nice.  And, what a surprise, ImageFX
has built-in virtual mem, unlike ADPro, and ImageFX's virtual mem is blazingly
fast compared to GigaMem, the virtual memory program I've used with ADPro.
HyperCache, a hard drive caching system, speeds up GigaMem a bunch, but it's
still creakingly slow compared to ImageFX.

  One thing that might or might not be important is that when ADPro comes
across a corrupted pic, it just gives up, but the faithful ImageFX hangs
right in there and converts it, glitch and all.  Sometimes it's just a few
bad lines across the bottom, nothing that can't be patched up with the paint
kit.


  So, after all that, I guess two things are pretty obvious:

  1) ImageFX appears to just blow the doors off of ADPro in just about every
     department.  Clearly, it's the program to have!

  2) You KNOW I'm holding something back!  :)

  Yes, the tiny, unfortunate, eensy little thing that ADPro does better than
ImageFX is: convert the pic.  Sorry, I've made countless A-B tests, and
ADPro almost always nudges out ImageFX by just a bit.  I've seen a few that
were real close, but never seen a better ImageFX conversion.  Sorry, that's
life.  You have to keep in mind the reason for this whole thing we're doing:
converting pictures.  To me, the entire idea behind all this is to get the
best conversion from a GIF or JPEG possible.  We haven't got "enhanced"
machines, so we're "stuck" looking at IFFs and HAMs.  So, we do the best we
can, and in this, I can't see compromising.  It's hard to discount all of
ImageFX's other features, but if conversions are what you're after, ADPro is
still the boss.  Bells and whistles are one thing, results are another.

  (wow, a surprise ending! :)


%Z