most of the pictures i try for the pan visual end up look like crap. anyone come up with something good, or decent even?

I got a great picture of Heidi Klum

cant seem to find attachment

what kind of picture do you want?
If you have one I can render it more 'goodlooking' on the empeg.

whoa man, that'd be cool. i've tried making pics of cars, my gf, and others, but i just can't get them right. let me get back to you.

Could you describe (in generalities) how you would tweak the image to make it display better?

Give a man a fish.....

Color-reduce it properly, maybe?

That was my first thought... was wondering if there were any other tricks that might help.

Namely, what is the best way to color reduce? If you just drop the pallette I suspect it doesn't look so hot, does photoshop or gimp provide an inteligent fashion to adjust the colors?

2U know macromedia fireworks?

In fact, whatever your favourite imaging soft, there's 3 steps:
1. open the original image (& resize it.)
2. use a custom palette (4 greyscales corresponding to the VFD 'colors') (e.g. 00-50-60-FF)
3. convert the image with custom palette using a good dithering level (~100% for pictures)

...and you're done.