Referring to something as a 'Microsoft Paint picture' when it is clear that it couldn't have been made by that program is to suggest that it has a banal simplicity, a rushed feel or both. The term generally gets applied to things that exhibit this (usually unintentional) art style, but has also seen use as an insult against artists. In the context of art and Webcomics, MSPaint is used as a term to refer to both an artwork style and an implied resulting quality. Anyone that has used the program should be familiar with how it generally looks by now. That means that a 2048x2048 expanse of white could easily take up over 8 MB of space, a huge amount of space back in the days of hard drive storage in the megabytes/low gigabytes and '1.44 MB' * Actually 1440 KiB, or 1.41 MiB floppy disks.Īll of this tends to give it a very computerized look.

Early versions had the opposite problem of saving all images as uncompressed bitmaps.

While this is a universal fact not limited to Paint, the problem is that Paint in Vista defaults to it, a problem compounded by Paint's fairly intensive JPEG compression making artifacts more likely to appear.

The JPEG format is not appropriate ◊ for most 'print screen' captures and drawings with flat colors and clean edges due to its lossy compression which is more suited to photographs.

The PNG format is handled mostly correctly, and should present no problems for most users, although the compression is pretty sub-optimal for advanced users.

Besides, GIF transparency support fails in the Windows XP version and all subsequent ones (including Windows 7 and above).

The GIF format would be appropriate, but uses 256 colors and Paint does not provide color quantization algorithms: Even in pictures with fewer than 256 colors, Paint systematically uses the system palette and screws up the colors.

Paint also has problems with image compression:.

At least until Windows 7 it's impossible to zoom out a image, meaning also that when working with large pictures it's impossible to select something larger than what can be seen on screen at a time.

Ms paint base