JPG Compression - The Bandwidth Saver 316
Mr.Tweak writes "TweakTown has posted an article entitled "JPG Compression - The Bandwidth Saver". An article for webmasters and site owners showing how they can significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth they use by compressing JPG images, one of the most common formats for web images. If you own a website and don't yet have knowledge in the field of JPG compression, you should find this very interesting indeed - Save money on bandwidth and please viewers at the same time with quicker loading webpages. They also talk briefly at JPEG2000."
Choose your compression with care... (Score:5, Interesting)
While compressing your images should be right up there on the Web designer 101 course, sometimes I despair that the wrong types of compression are chosen.
JPEG is an excellent compression method for photographic images, both colour and greyscales. The image distortion is not noticeable by most people even at high compression ratios and the resulting image is close enough to the original.
JPEG is NOT an excellent compression method for line diagrams, maps and bitmaps featuring a limited colour palette - the artifacts created by the transforms used by the algorithms blur rapid changes in colour and can make text unreadable. Even worse, for most diagrams, PNG lossless compression yields smaller results because of the limited palette and large amount of redundancy inherent in the data.
JPEG 2000 promises even better compression ratios with superior image quality. Wavelet compression methods tend to reduce the amount of blur caused by the discrete cosine transforms and are better at handling rapid changes in colours. But that doesn't mean that it is a blanket solution.
I also look forward to the day when SVG is a widely available and widely supported browser option. We can all benefit when complex layouts can be described in terms of vectors and colour fills rather than overlarge and complex bitmaps for the classic web page touches like 3D colour balls and arrows. That will also save bandwidth while increasing the flexibility and variety of images on the web.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
interesting article... (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know who i'm most disappointed in.
A - Tweaktown, for posting such an inane article in the first place
B - MrTweak, for relaying it to slashot. Of course, he probably wrote it.
C - Hemos for posting it.
I mean really... the whole thing reeks of MrTweak wanting more site traffic and turning to slashdot with a story about anything to get it. Like "oh my god, i didn't know i could COMPRESS graphics?"
Proposal to slash: never accept submissions from people with obvious links to the article in question...