                           View Image Plus.

                     Lee Bohan - September 1992.


Good picture viewers today are ten a penny, or even cheaper.  Provided
that  is  you  happen  to have the latest SVGA card and happen to have
Windows on your system. Several megabytes of memory and a  rapid  hard
disk  are  also advantageous. But what if you want to look at pictures
from the plain old C:> prompt?

Well, for a while now I've admired  a  program  called  Vuimage  by  a
company called Offe Enterprises. Many times I thought about taking the
plunge  and  getting  a registered version; but having a power PC with
SVGA and windows I held back. That was until a few weeks ago,  when  I
started on developing a slideshow for Stunn to use at computer shows.

Getting  some  silly  pictures that would grab attention, and adding a
Stunn logo was easy. Then I turned my attention to thinking of  a  way
to  display  them.  Although  I had numerous GIF viewers, none of them
seemed to offer an easy way to do a slide show. Then I noticed a small
section in the Vuimage manual mentioning their registered version  did
just  this.  So,  begging  bowl  in hand I approached Offe Enterprises
about letting us have a copy. Just a week and a  half  later,  a  copy
dropped through the door.

I  thought  Vuimage  was  good,  but  Vuimage Plus is nothing short of
incredible. The viewing section seems faster and better than  the  old
version.  Another  boon  is the depth of support for SVGA resolutions,
thus I can happily stretch my Tseng SVGA card to it's full 1024*768 in
256 colours with it. I could also get the most out of just about every
other SVGA card I can think of (and for that many I haven't even heard
of). If I have any reserves about the support, it's that there  is  no
S3 accelerator support or anything above 256 colours. I do not believe
this is a real draw back however.

File  formats  that  can  be  viewed are only GIF (compuserve Graphics
Interchange Format), TIF (Tagged Image Format), PCX (popular for paint
packages) and plain old ASCII text. Having said only, these cover well
over 95% of the pictures I have seen on a PC and cleverly allow README
files to be looked at too. I wouldn't even say this  was  a  drawback,
more like a useful simplification ignoring the obsolete I'd say.

The  shareware program Vuimage can be obtained from all good Shareware
libraries. Vuimage Plus, the real creame de la creame however, is only
available direct from Offe Enterprises at  the  cost  of  $35  or  $50
depending  on  the type of registration. In my humble opinion, a small
price to pay for a file viewer, far superior to anything  the  Windows
environment.  Anyone  who  enjoys  pictures  on their PC would be well
advised to consider it.


Should you wish to contact Offe Enterprises, they can be reached at:

               Offe Enterprises,
               1163, E. Ogden Avenue,
               Suite 705-131,
               Naperville,
               IL 60563,
               USA.


Authors Postscript: Thanks to  Offe  Enterprises  for  kindly  letting
Stunn  have  a  complimentary copy of Vuimage Plus.

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