BPG image format aims to replace jpeg?

[Paul2]

There's no doubt that JPEG is the web's go-to image format, offering both widespread compatibility and small file sizes, but its compression artifacts and an 8-bit limitation mean it's far from perfect. Alternative image formats have been developed that provide higher-quality compression, but nothing yet has come close to toppling JPEG thanks to its ubiquity. BPG is the latest new format to challenge it.

Created by Fabrice Bellard, a developer responsible for other open-source projects, BPG stands for Better Portable Graphics and offers a number of improvements over JPEG format. Most notably, BPG is based on the HEVC/H.265 video compression standard. This is a major advantage over other non-standard image formats, as H.265 will likely be supported by hardware soon.

BPG's more efficient algorithm also supports up to 14-bit files rather than JPEG's 8-bit only support. It also uses the same means of chroma sub-sampling as JPEG, which is good for transcoding. The format also features support for EXIF and other metadata, as well as lossless compression. When comparing images of roughly the same file size, BPG offers noticeably fewer artifacts than JPEG (as well other more optimized formats like Google's WebP), as demonstrated in this image comparison tool on GitHub.

These substantial improvements over JPEG make BPG an appealing alternative, but for now ability to use the format is limited to use with a JavaScript decoder.

http://www.dpreview.com/articles/0350654437/bpg-image-format-aims-to-replace-jpegs

http://xooyoozoo.github.io/yolo-octo-bugfixes/#soccer-players&png=s&bpg=s

click on the 2nd url link to see the comparisons.  damn, that is a lot of comparisons there.  Lots of pictures to select to do the comparisons and in different formats too.  But i think the default soccer players comparison is a very good comparison.  i thought this bpg is very efficient compressor but it smoothed out the fine dotted pattern details around the nike logo on the green rectangle shape on the shirt of the player on the left wearing red with the number 18.  even in "large" settings.

[Titan]

I'll have to take a look when I get to a computer. This would be cool if it got adopted. With modern cameras and shooting in raw, I can tell you how much data is lost. I never print in jpegs because of how much its compressed. I always tried to use tiff for prints. I only used jpegs on my photography websites.

That being said, I can't see a switch anytime soon. Jpegs are so engrained and standard it will be tough to dethrone them.