Paul Buchheit has gotten pretty cranked up about some convenience methods we should have put into the imaging APIs. Yup. Guilty as charged. There are only 24 hours in a day and we can't get around to everything, and back then we were putting most of our energy into the enterprise APIs. Java is a community, not a product. So, Paul: I encourage you to join in and help make the imaging APIs better (or any other's that might trigger a rant). Collaboration is a good thing.