Xinfe Ewalavir wrote:
... After further investigation, I found out that when disabling the 'Dither' option, GIMP's result is exactly the same as Inkscape. So, is it possible to implement this feature for *.png exports (opt-in/out) ? Nice article : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither#Digital_photography_and_image_processing
In the past I tried this (in fact, I still have some code lying around to do part of this in Inkscape), but it has a few problems in Inkscape. First of all, file size is really increased considerably. This might not be a big problem in some cases, but is a good reason to at least not make it the default. Secondly, you're basically adding noise to your gradient that can become visible under certain circumstances. Again not something that's always an issue, but still.
So frankly I'd be more inclined to push for 16 bit (per channel) rendering in Inkscape and either dither the whole image at the end or simply save as 16 bit per channel and let the image viewer worry about dithering and such. These options will both give (much) higher quality results than just dithering an individual gradient and mostly avoid the above.
In any case, work is currently underway to change to using Cairo for rendering in Inkscape, so once that is done I guess this will have to be reevaluated (and I expect/hope that gradients will be handled by Cairo, so any changes would have to be made there).