what are Vector & Raster graphics? What's the difference between them & which one is better?

Question

Which applications can make them.. & whats scalable vector

Answer 1

Raster (aka Pixel) graphics represents an image as a matrix (a two-dimensional array) of pixels. In color images, every single pixel can have its individual color. Thus, raster graphics is well suited for naturally-looking images or images with many (thousands and more) different colors and shades and transitions between colors. JPEG, GIF, PNG, etc. are all raster graphic image formats. Raster images, however, do not behave well when scaled, especially not when scaled up, when they appear blurred.

Vector graphics represents an image as a set of lines (vectors) or, more generally, mathematical curves, possibly also defining the fill color between them. Vector graphics is suitable for artificial, technical images, like technical drawings, maps, but also cartoons and nice-looking text. For example, in modern computer fonts (PostScript and the like) single letters are represented as vector graphics. Vector graphics can easily be scaled up and down without losing sharpness (that's how you get arbitrary font size in your word processor). Also, the vector representation of the mentioned types of images (technical and the like) is much more compact (uses less memory) than raster graphics. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a format developed for the Internet, but seldom supported by browsers. As far as I know, Macromedia Flash uses vector graphics, but there are certainly many more.