I’m going to try and review this piece of software as objective as I can. But today I’m going to review the new child of UIC Phoenxsoftware 36-image converter 4.4.
36IC 4.4 Screenshot
The installation process goes quite smoothly and the installer isn’t to heavy with approximately 9Mb.
When the installer quits the Extension Manager opens and you can start assigning extensions to 36-image converter. 36IC, has as you must have already suspected, 36 input filetypes, they are : bmp, jpeg, jpg, gif, png, tif, ico, psd, cut, pic, cel, pbm, pgm, ppm, pdd, bw, rgb, rgba, sgi, rla, rpf, pcc, pcx, icb, eps, fax, tga, tiff, dib, rle, emf, wmf, psp, pcd, tif, icb, jfif, pii and rawpii. This is quite impressive, not as impressive as IrfanView, but 36IC doesn’t use any additional plugins to open exotic filetypes, so this is an “alright” achievement. The Extension Manager is easy in use, it won’t win a beauty contest with its windows 98 style buttons, but it works.
After assigning a few filetypes to 36-image converter, I open the main executable. A splash screen pops-up, all very nice, remind me of Photoshop CS3. The loading time is quite short on my Macbook 2,4Ghz so this is alright, its not super fast but it’s not irritating slow either. When it starts for the first time it opens a tutorial.
When we check the system resources it uses, we discover that it constantly uses CPU, even when no action is done. The memory usage is comparable to that of the average browser, quite a lot, but manageable for modern computers. So this is no light application.
The interface is very nice, you have blue icons with reflections on a black background, very fancy looking. The icons interact when moved over, they get some kind of glow. By clicking the large icons at the top you can toggle between the submenus.
The capabilities of this image converter are comparable to those of the average non-layered image editor, resizing, undo/redo, rotating, cropping, erasing selections, painting, inserting text, applying filters and picture frames. 36IC comes with some beautiful stock photography, some ocean pictures, beautiful sky pictures, even from above the clouds.
Then we get to the most important capability of 36-image converter, converting. When I go to the Convert-submenu. I see a lot of filetypes : Jpeg (native), Jpeg (Advanced), Jpeg2000, BMP, DIB, GIF, PNG, JNG, ICO, CUR, TIF, TIFF, TGA, PCX, PBM, PPM, PGM, WMF, EMF, RAW, RAWPII and PII. With 21 output filetypes, 36IC 4.4 has 1 output filetype more than IrfanView (again without external plugins) and as much as Photoshop CS3. It can even create non-transparent windows cursors. All these filetypes are equipped with a tooltip providing info comprehendible for a noob.
36IC 4.4 also comes with a private-mode for images. Pii (Phoenx Internal Images) can be protected by a password. Ideal for us men who sometimes store nice pictures in a faraway hidden folder. 
36IC 4.4 has an extensive help-file, tooltips, a Readme file, a tutorial, an “Ask the developer”-function and online support. So enough to make itself comprehendible.
Conclusion : 36-image converter 4.4 is definitely an improvement to its predecessors. It can read and write a massive amount of filetypes, it has a nice interface, has some nice functions, is easy to understand, but in functionality it cannot compare to The GIMP, Paint .Net or Photoshop. Layers would definitely be an improvement and there should be more effects.
- Functionality : 5/10
- Filetypes : 9/10
- Speed : 7/10
- Interface : 9/10
- Ease of use : 8/10
- Help : 8/10
- Price/Quality : 10/10 (Freeware)
Average Score : 8/10
