How do I view very large images on a Zaurus?

[ericglam]

I am an Architect (buildings not systems) who got a SL5600 to use in the field.  I installed the biggest SD card I could find (512 megs) and created a large swapfile (16 megs on the SD card).  With it I can use qpdf2 to view codes, CAD files, information requests, project specifications and whatever as long as I can get it into PDF format.

What I cannot do is view large images, bigger than 1600 x 1024 pixels. I do not need to view the whole image at once, but I do need to be able to scan around them like one would do with a web driving direction map.  Many of these images are of urban zoning maps and aerial photos.  Right now I have a written simple c program that splits large images into a bunch of smaller files. Unfortunately this is much like using a road atlas that doesn’t tell you what page the adjoining maps are on.

I have tried TxImage (great for small to medium size files), ZImage (my favorite so far), QIV (refused to install), and ImageBrowser ( installed fine but refused to work and had to be manually uninstalled) What else is out there?

File formats do not seem to make much of a difference, though I have had better luck with GIF and PNG files and not so good luck with JPG and TIF files. Qpdf2 will sometimes display large images put into PDF format, but you cannot zoom in on them without the program just giving up and quitting with no explanation.  The other image viewers I have tried, if they can even open the image, do the same as well.   I assume that I am out of memory, because before I created the swapfile I got out-of-memory errors when trying to view large images.

Are there modifications (software , firmware or hardware) that I can do to the SL5600 that will make large images viewable?  I know I am pushing this little guy way beyond what it was supposed to do, but my digital camera will do what I am trying to do just fine with 18 meg TIF files.

[Greg2]

I\'ve never opened an 18meg image with this but it works good for 2meg pics. It was designed for medical use but makes a great viewer for almost anything.
Here:
http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/showdetail.php?app=685

Greg

[ScottYelich]

I\'ve found that .tif is one of the most verbose and wasteful image formats -- but I know why it is used.
With that said, even if you had to convert the 18MB tiff into a 1MB jpeg, large images seem to give
the zaurus room for pause.  

in fact, when I\'ve tried to view large images, I simply get locked up.  People have suggested enabled
a (large) swap file.  I\'m not sure how this would make a difference, I didn\'t try it... perhaps it would help.

In theory, the Z should be almost smooth as glass to view large images -- especially with only a 320x240
view pane!

Please do let us know if you find any app that will handle large images without choking.

Scott

[raybert]

I haven\'t tried it, but I remembered seeing this one a while back: <http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/showdetail.php?app=802>

It is designed to display large map images that were scanned from a printed map, so it might work well for what you\'re trying to do.  OTOH, it is written in java so I don\'t know that it will handle really big images and low memory well.

~ray

[oreo]

SL5600 to use in the field. a large swapfile (16 megs on the SD card).  What I cannot do is view large images, bigger than 1600 x 1024 pixels.

This is how I do it. I hope you can find a similar solution.

I have an SL-5500 and no swapfile. I need to easily view images of ACLS algorithms (Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support).

Viewing large tiff files is too slow. To make viewing image files useful, I created a library of jpeg files. The largest jpeg file is 458kB. The image files open quickly in ImagePad. I can tap and drag to move around the image and follow the flowchart. This works very well. You might convert  your large files to jpeg and give it a try.

Another method: You can open local image files with Opera. Opera allows very useful scaling from 20% to 400%. PDF files with Opera are slow, but jpeg and tiff files open quickly. I don\'t have a tiff file of your size to try. The largest tiff file I tried is 800kB. You can tap and drag in Opera.

[bluedevils]

theKompany\'s image viewer is supposed to be optimized for large pictures.  They might have a demo version you can tryout to see if it meets your needs.

[spaul]

I have a 3.2 megapixel camera that tx image handles fine even when i use gimp\'s bicubic interpolation to double the size.  One thing i noticed is that if the file is not a common size (in terms of the ratio of the two axes) tx image sometimes balks.  My impression, perhaps wrong, is that it can read large images.

Hope this helps.