PCX (Personal Computer eXchange) was the native file format for PC Paintbrush and before GIF, JPEG and PNG, was one of the first widely accepted DOS imaging standards. This image file format was developed by ZSoft Corporation of Marietta, Georgia, USA.
PCX is a raster image format, the file header stores metadata about the image, separately from the actual image bitmap. PCX files commonly store palette-indexed images from 2 or 4 colors to 16 and 256 colors.
PCX file is consisted of three main sections:
- File header: 128 byte header that contains an identifier byte, a version number, image dimensions, a 16 color palette, number color planes and the bit depth of each plane.
- Image data: PCX image data is stored in rows or scan lines in top-down order.
- Color palette: Optional 256 color palette is added after VGA display hardware was introduced, because PCX file has space in header only for 16 color palette. The solution was to put the palette at the end of the file, along with a marker byte to confirm its existence.
The PCX file format, these days, has mostly been replaced by newer image formats, but is still used by some applications.
Except converting, PCX viewer can be used and for resizing, enlarge or reduce, without losing any quality of the image file. All this is available with PCX viewer for FREE.
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