The Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2009 rules: http://www.fractalartcontests.com/2009/rules.php say: "Some images may be selected for printing at even larger size (12000 pixels in the largest dimension) so entrants would do well to be aware of the size requirements." To test Fractint's current large image abilities I created a Disk Video mode of 12,000 x 12,000 pixels for my DOS 20.0 Fractint by adding a line to my FRACTINT.CFG file and used it to create Fractint's default Mandelbrot set. Amazingly, it took only a minute and 30 seconds to calculate the 144 million pixels using my 2.2 GHz AMD processor. Encoding the .GIF format file while saving it seemed to take about a minute. Fractint chose to write directly to my hard disk using a 54 KB 'Fractint cache size.' The resulting .GIF image was a well-formed 4.4 MB file -- with a *lot* of detail in it. (But not as much as in a typical zoom.) I was able to easily pan and scroll around in the 12,000 x 12,000 .GIF image using my image viewing program, CompuPic. The image aspect ratio was stretched slightly vertically since I specified a 'square' output image instead of the usual 4 x 3 aspect ratio (that would be 12,000 x 8,000 pixels here). I also created a 12,000 x 8,000 pixel image which had the expected aspect ratio and shape of the Mandelbrot set. - Hal Lane ######################### # hallane@earthlink.net # #########################