I made a rather large picture hte other day, and to send it to a friend, I Zipped it. It was a Bitmap (BMP) file. The actual BMP is 900k. When I zipped it, The zip file was a very managable 24K. Now, to the point: When the picture was unzipped from the archive, no quality had been lost. My question is pretty much: Why hasnt anyone made an MP3 of pictures? an MP3 is pretty much a layered wav that sort of like a zip file (without being too technical). So why cant we have 24K pictures on the internet that use a plug in to basically decode/unzip/whatever an image to its full 900k quality potential? Why are Jpeg artifacts and Gif limitations acceptable when theres what seems to be a feasable solution to both? What dont I get?

Ever heard of PNG?

It is an image format with lossless compression via ZLib.

Well Ill be damned. I didnt know thats what PNG files were. I just knew they were used alot as textures.
Now i know why.

AND KNOWING IS HALF THE BATTLE.

As far as i know, jpeg is the "mp3 for images"; they have the same mathematical background. However, *peg compression is lossy. Png is more like zip, as it is lossless.

I actually have thought about having a lossy compression method for "general data". Lossily compressed text would be interesting. You certainly would not want to write the file multiple times over and over again, to prevent the data from corrupting completely.

[Edited by - Ubik on October 18, 2004 6:45:35 AM]

I agree with Ubik that JPEG would be the MP3 of graphics. By the way, MP3 is lossy, too. It's not noticable when compressing the type of sound that MP3 was meant for, but JPEG artifacts aren't noticable when compressing the types of images that JPEG was meant for, either.