E-Charts - Formats....

....unfortunately are nearly as many as different vendors, and what´s worse, most of them are not compatible. From a more basic perspective there are two main types:
Pixelbased and Vectorized formats.
Pixelbased Pictures have a maximum reslution, and by zooming in beyond that you see the single pixels very clearly. Besides that, for a big high resolution picture this is a mass of data. Common formats for European Charts like that are BSB-Charts.




Vectorized Pictures use an angle and a length (a vector...) to describe every single point of the picture.
So every zoom is just a calculation issue, you won´t see any pixels at all. Furthermore, as these Pictures store information like a database, you can add many POI information to certain positions on the chart - up to blinking lights, if you want. This is the format (ENC) commercial Ships are using.



Ressources:
ENC´s and official BSB´s or RNC´s are issued by the Navy Ministries of the according states (in Germany: