Quote Originally Posted by Schmidt View Post
Why would you want to save "not-really-image-data" into a 16Bit-PNG format?

Why not save your array directly to disk?
- Either as 1025x1025 Long-Array (resulting in ~4MB)
- Or as 1025x1025 Integer-Array (resulting in ~2MB)

Is it only because of the losless compression the PNG-format offers?

When you don't insist on PNG, you are free to use any losless algorithm you want,
to compress either your Long- or your Integer-Array before writing it to disk.

Edit: Yep, LaVolpe basically pointed out the same thing.

Olaf
When dealing with cross platforms, having a commonly available format is handy, plenty of Image/Photo Editors support the format, and are used quite often to edit such maps.