I'm slowly making progress. There's a sybase connection attribute (syb_binary_images) that by default returns binary as hex. Now I don't have to convert the data.

Now I've discovered that the issue appears to be independent of the db. I've taken a larger sampling of files to read and print directly to the browser. The same images are displaying incorrectly (stupid me should have done this to begin with). I can open the gif files with either a browser or my image viewer and it looks fine. Reading the files and printing data to the browser is causing problems.

All the sample code I've found is doing the same thing I am (see code in original node). Ideas???