Hacker News Reader

Comment by M-Valentino | Hacker News Reader

I want a phone that lets you shoot PNG

Why? PNG is really a bad format for photos (simply was not designed for this use case)

JPEG-XL has a lossless mode if that's what you're after ...

I like PNG's lossless compression. I feel like PNG was a really bad format back when hard drives were 100GB, but now storage is so cheap. I didn't know JPEP-XL had a lossless mode. Other than that format, I don't know of any other formats that offer lossless compression other than bitmap and TIF. You can't really use TIFs in many contexts and bitmaps have no compression at all.

I can't imagine a PNG actually having a good compression ratio for photographic data. Better at that point to just shoot RAW.

Why not?

Because of how PNG compresses images. The high detail will lead to large images, and at that point it’d be easier to save the RAW output of the camera, offload the images, and do any compression later.

Because png compression is optimized for images with few distinct colors and long runs of the same color. Photographs are not like that.

RAW is the correct format for uncompressed images, and you can shoot RAW on iphone: https://support.apple.com/en-us/119916

> I feel like PNG was a really bad format back when hard drives were 100GB

You talk about "hard drive" space even though phones don't have hard drives (more to the point, even if you transfer photos to your desktop they will start on your phone and take up space). The iPhone 15 base model comes with 128GB storage. Uncompressed images take up huge amounts of space and that still affects network transfer times, phone storage, cloud storage, etc.

Anyway you can shoot RAW on your phone right now, which is what you are looking for. Still, it is a niche application because of the storage required.

WebP also has a lossless variant, and it compresses much better than PNG.

Storage isn't cheap, check the iPhone storage upgrade prices

And apps have grown in size, and video/photo size has grown

"Storage isn't cheap" "check the [Apple product] upgrade prices"

Under this logic, RAM is still $100 / 8GB, a factor of ~4x greater than non-Apple prices. A similar coefficient is true for their SSD storage pricing.

Source: Mac Pro configuration page https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/tower

Yes, under this logic you can't ignore the reality of a large % of users when making sweeping claims about the reality of all users.

Also don't forget the fact that many devices can't be storage-upgraded, so this pushes the actual cost of extra storage even higher

PNG is designed for images that don't change colors between each pixel very often. That's how its compression algorithm works.

Images, by their nature, are far more fluid, which is why a FFT-based compression algorithm, like the one in jpegs, makes sense for photos.

> FFT-based compression algorithm, like the one in jpegs

Nit: DCT-based

My idea for wanting PNG encoding is that they have lossless compression, and that the other common format that preserves details is bitmap, which has no lossless compression. At least PNG might compress photos somewhat. The web is plagued with images that have been resaved over and over that have JPEG degradation. I did not know JPG-XL had a lossless format so that's promising imo. But JPG-XL isn't supported in many browsers.

Unless you'll exclusively use it for pictures of text intended for web consumption, you don't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com