JPEG COMPRESSION EXAMPLE

Although the strings are a little crisp on the edges, the 24-bit color depth lends richness to the wood tones and subte grays in the tuning pegs. Even at the minimum compression level, the file size was reduced 84% from the original TIFF file! There is no noticable degradation from the original.

Absolutely indistiguishable from the previous image, yet half the filesize. Isn't compression wonderful?

Less than a third of the first image's filesize, and still no visible image degradation.

Still a great image, but the filesize reduction is becoming less and less significant. We could just go with this one, since experience tells us that we can't trim any more than a few more seconds off the load time before the image quality is noticably affected, but let's remember that every bit of reduction we can squeeze out of each image can add up to something significant. Let's keep going.

This is getting a little boring. Having dome this so many times before, I know that the image is beginning to suffer, but I still can't really see it.

Boring. When is this damn thing going to start getting ugly?

Still looks fine to me.

Still looking good. And look at the filesize! Less than 5k! Imagine how impressed your friends will be amazed when this image just "pops up" on their tube.

OK, its not perfect, but for this particular image, this amount of compression is acceptable. Barely. So do we stick with this image for our page, or for a measly 800 bytes or more, do we back up and choose a cleaner one?

For the first time, we can clearly see the chunky patches resulting from the compression. We've gone too far.

Finally. Total Chaos. So bad, it's good.