Better
 

Wich one of these is beter?

I much prefer the bottom one. Looks much more realistic than the top one. The shading has been done pretty poorly in that one.

Bottom one would look nicer if it was slightly darker.

bottom

I hate when people use dark background colors. Especially when somebody tries to show me a sprite with black filling the negative area.

I prefer the top, and I think that if the background was made transparent, more would agree. (I'm assuming of course we are to be judging it as if its meant to go in-game)

Right now, the dark background half is acting like the lower sprite's outline.

They both look good, but let us compare it without the background.

Zen that is a strange request. If that graphic is going to be used on a server, 99% of the time it's going to be on a dark background.

Top.

Has better depth.

Because the bottom of the barrel is so light, on the lower one, it almost looks as if it's INDENTED into the background.

I thought that too, but I was too lazy to post it.

I have spoken for you, praise me.

Sprites generally dont look right to me if they dont have some sort of darker outline, be it jet-black or simply darker shades of the inside colors.

Sprites, especially player sprites, needs enough contrast to stand out from the background 100% of the time, regardless of what colors of terrain are behind the character at any given moment.

If somebody tries to show you a sprite with jet black in the negative area, you cant honestly give an accurate opinion about the image itself because your eye is tricked by the background color acting as an outline.

I'm simply saying it does you more justice to see the image independantly, if you aim to make something look good 100% of the time, it ought to look good regardless of what color is around it.

Donald did this alot when showing me stuff, and most of the time it always looked great with black fill around it, but when I showed him how the sprite looked with white surrounding it, even he agreed sometimes that it needed more work.

Yea, I remember when he would post stuff with black backgrounds, and on different backgrounds you would see some little details that needed fixing. I try doing stuff like that to get different perspectives of my work :)

Here you go.

Bottom lighter one looks a lot better on a white background than it does on a purple background, that's for sure.

Bottem looks cleaner.