I have always been fascinated by ASCII Art since my first days using a UNIX terminal. Spending hours making faces out of the character only console. One of the top bookmarks at Del.icio.us today was Glass Giant’s ASCII Art.
During last summer they even had live Telnet ASCII coverage of the World Cup, some quite impressive conversions and almost all live. Check out ASCII-WM.net for more info.
Firstly as seen above I converted one of the POTW 08 pictures. Then since I had not touched ascii converters for some years I did a quick search and found some even better converts. (Again this is only for still pictures, for video I still want to find something a little more user friendly than the ascii-wm setup).
Below you can see the conversion done at DaGraeve.com. Which I think is a tad bit better than what GlassGiant offered.
The best conversion and enhancements I found at ASCIIConvert, below:
My comparison is just a quick and dirty one, so I might be mistaken of each engines’ conversion qualities.