PNG images are compressed bitmapped, raster images, where the picture is defined by co-ordinate pairs of colours for every pixels.
SVGs, on the other hand, don't use pixels; instead, they use primitives. This means that scaling doesn't negatively affect quality.
Try checking out Inkscape. It's free and comes with a built-in vectorizer. Here's a list of steps (adapted from http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Potrace):
- Import your PNG, using .
- Ensure that the imported image is selected.
- Under the menu, click . (Hotkey is Alt+Shift+B.)
- Click "Update" on the right-hand side.
- Brightness cutoff: at 1.0, generates a black box. Basically, the higher, the more is included.
- Multiple scans→Colors: Change the number of scans. At 2 scans, it's nearly grayscale; 16 is enough to show relatively accurate colour. (Note that the more scans, the more objects, causing higher filesize!)
- Modify settings until you feel the conversion is good. (I've played with the following settings; they should be good for normal use:)
- Press "OK." Wait until "OK" is re-enabled.
- You're done!