Home  /  File formats  /  dcx

DCX file format

Extension.dcx
Categoryimages
DescriptionDCX is a file format used for storing multiple-image files, such as scanned documents or images. It was developed by the Zsoft Corporation and was widely used in the 1980s and 1990s for faxing and storing images on IBM PC-compatible systems.
Technical detailsA DCX file consists of a series of pages, each of which is a black-and-white or color image stored as a compressed bitmap. The compression format used in DCX files is a variant of the Group 3 fax compression algorithm, which is a lossless compression method that can achieve high compression ratios. Each page in a DCX file is stored as a separate bitmap file, with the file header containing information such as the file type, the number of pages, and the resolution of the images. The file header is followed by the compressed bitmap data for each page, with each page's data preceded by a small header containing the width and height of the image and its compression format.