Questions and postings pertaining to the usage of ImageMagick regardless of the interface. This includes the command-line utilities, as well as the C and C++ APIs. Usage questions are like "How do I use ImageMagick to create drop shadows?".
PNG will store images with a lot of detail. So of course the result is bigger.
You can try using a different -quality setting for PNG (see IM examples PNG, quaility)
or better still try using "OptiPNG" to compress you image better.
If exact color and no transparency is involve you can try saving to PNG8:image.png to get a color reduced version. Or you can use another PNG tool "pngnq" to do the same thing in a non-IM way, but attempts to preserve semi-transparency (which the IM PNG8 coder can not do.
That would be nice. and you can actually set up a 'optpng:' output delegate to get IM to call that program itself. (That would actually be a nice delegate example too if someone would care to figure it out.)
however the coders within IM are limited by the fact that IM is itself a general image processor. while optipng is a specialized processor so can spend more time and effort on just one part.