How much does JPEG compression degrade images?
Picture Window uses JPEG file compression to reduce the size of images so they fit on floppy disks for easy print ordering. Thus it’s important to know how much loss of image quality this compression causes. It seems it would be impossible to reduce the size of an image by a factor of 5 to 10 without adversely affecting its quality, but this is exactly what JPEG does. We have made many test prints of compressed images — using the level of compression we recommend, it is extremely difficult to tell the compressed image from the original. You can prove this to yourself using Picture Window by saving an image in JPEG format and reopening it in another window side by side with the original. Even zoomed in, it’s very hard to see any difference between the original and the compressed image. While JPEG compression is ideally suited to submitting images to our print service, we do not recommend that you routinely save images in JPEG format for two reasons: 1) Repeated cycles of compression an
