ER Viewer

ERDAS ER Viewer is an image viewer that supports all the commonly known formats plus and additional number of types used in various scientific domains.
Setting it aside from other image viewers, this application is capable of opening and displaying ECW files. Enhanced Compression Wavelet or ECW is a file format that is created to optimize large aerial and satellite images by successfully retaining contrast and visual quality.
Since satellite images have a poor dynamic range, the application uses its automatic contrast enhancement facility to clip a fraction of the image data at the lower ends and corrects the contrast.
Interface-wise, ERDAS ER Viewer is fairly self explanatory with a commonly found layout. Once a file is opened, the application provides you with the tools you need to pan the image, zoom and out, as well as measure the distance between two pints.
Besides images located on your computer, the application can also open ECW and JPEG2000 compressed files over a network or an image web server. To do so, all you have to do is provide the URL for the image and the application opens it without downloading if first.
ERDAS ER Viewer can work with multiple file types and it also enables you to save the loaded images to formats such as ERS, TIF, BMP, HDR and JPG.
Since the application is designed to work with large scale, large resolution images, its ‘Pan’ function is one of the most reliable features it has. You can use it to view the image when you are zoomed in and drag it in any direction.
The zoom and pan functions can be activated using both your mouse and keyboard. This makes it very easy to switch between the two. ERDAS ER Viewer also features a ‘ZoomBox; tool that lets you select a region of the loaded image and automatically zooms in when the mouse button is released.
So, if you’re looking for a simple, fast and reliable way of viewing ECW and many other image formats, you can give ERDAS ER Viewer a try.