Comments on: Why JPEGs are not always good

By: Eugenia

Eugenia — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 05:51:51 +0000

Hehe, good guess. I haven’t used BeOS in years though, these days I am a big gadget freak…
I moved to Blogsome myself just a few days ago btw ( http://eugenia.blogsome.com/ ), and I stole your “Older Items / Newer Items” WP code.

By: Matthew Schinckel

Matthew Schinckel — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 03:19:21 +0000

I think we probably actually agree - I wrote the post after coming across yet another screenshot, of a small part of the screen, where it had been saved as a JPEG, but there was some serious artifaction (!?) going on. For many situations, no amount of lossiness is acceptable. For me, that is situations where icons, buttons and other bits and pieces from a computer screen appear.

Hey! I remember you! You are another BeOS refugee!

By: Eugenia

Eugenia — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 02:46:28 +0000

I don’t see what you are saying.

It is obvious that for pictures of people and places, JPEG must be used.

For icons and artistic designs, PNG must be used.

For very simple icons, 32×32 or smaller, GIF actually provides better filesizes than PNGs, especially when reducing the number of colors.

Now, for screenshots of PC/Mac desktops, I argue –as a web manager of a very popular tech site for over 4 years now– that the best option is the one that offers the best ratio of filesize/quality. For example, if you take a PNG screenshot of your Mac desktop and it’s 500 KBs and the same shot in JPEG is only 100 KBs (at 90% quality rate), then go with JPEG — obviously. Bandwidth COSTS money you see. If the PNG is very close to JPEG in terms of filesize (e.g. 100 KBs for JPEG, 150 KB for PNG), go for PNG!

Use the right tool everytime. There is a different need for each one of them. And for 99% of the people, bandwidth is always an issue.