Post any defects you find in the released or beta versions of the ImageMagick software here. Include the ImageMagick version, OS, and any command-line required to reproduce the problem. Got a patch for a bug? Post it here.
For the first conversion I'm seeing the same result whether the output is .png or .txt so I don't think it's a PNG bug.
For the second conversion, it is to be expected that the quantization is lousy because we are simply dropping
the low 5 bits of the Red and Green samples and the low 6 bits of blue.
Converting spheregif.gif to spheregif.png looks pretty good, exactly the same as spheregif.gif but smaller file size.