Image Handling in Java

Image Handling is a very vast concept in Java which begins from display of images to processing of images, but everybody likes to work with images so i started studying about the subject. Possibly for everybody the starting thing is how to show an image on screen??
So in that category, first came the ImageIcon, the most basic ones and offered very little to tweak. Then it was the turn of Image class...it was good till i heard about BufferedImage class, a derived class from Image class offering better performance most importantly.
Even Image class will work if its just about display of images. But if someone wants a better performance in terms of images, BufferedImage is definetly needed to be used....it offers Buffering of image data and the whole image can be directly transferred to screen thus improving performance. Infact if we first draw an offscreen image and draw the offscreen image on screen, thus using the much talked DoubleBuffering concept, visible distortions will be removed drastically, which we can see otherwise many a times.
As i talk about Double Buffering, its important to talk about Flickering.
I really need to tell here, it was a dreaded thing for me as i tried hard to remove the flickering of images. Infact Flickering is a pretty general term which can be seen not just in Images drawing but also in Swing components sometimes as well.
As its a big problem, I will talk about Flickering in my next post in order to elaborate on it!!