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Comment by NinoScript | Hacker News Reader

I’d guess hardware acceleration could have something to do with it

I don't know, but my guesswork is that the DNG/ProRAW/JXL support comes with compatibility challenges. Limiting the size of the launch to well-informed photography prosumers and professionals will help to iron out the compatibility challenges — rather than make all confused consumers face these challenges at once.

I don't think that hardware support plays a role here. The fastest encoding modes of JPEG XL are ridiculously fast on software, and Apple's CPUs seem powerful enough.

In lossy mode I think there is no difference between AVIF, HEIC or JXL. AVIF is even a little bit ahead.

For lossless mode, JXL's fast modes (-e1 and -e2) are fast. But their compression ratio is terrible. The higher levels are not usable in a camera in terms of speed. Of course, my favorite and many people's favorite in this regard is HALIC (High Availability Lossless Image Compression). It is a speed/compression monster. The problem is that for now it is closed source and there is no Google or similar company behind it.

> In lossy mode I think there is no difference between AVIF, HEIC or JXL. AVIF is even a little bit ahead.

AVIF is definitely not ahead for the high quality levels you'd use in photography. AVIF is ahead at lower quality levels.

> For lossless mode, JXL's fast modes (-e1 and -e2) are fast. But their compression ratio is terrible.

JXL lossless e1 is still a lot better than the lossless compression people tend to use for photos these days. Like Apple has been using Lossless JPEG, which sucks.

Agreed. At camera quality jpeg xl is far ahead in quality. Apple's last announcement is about camera quality, close to lossless kind of lossy. In this domain jpeg xl does not have real competition. AVIF and HEIC don't even support more than 12 bits of dynamics, and become slow when quality is increased.

>AVIF is definitely not ahead for the high quality levels you'd use in photography.

I read the parent's point of comparison in terms of speed, not quality.

Last time I tested, libjxl e1 had a better compression ratio than default libpng, while being two orders of magnitude faster. See https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-and-the-pareto-front#the...

The point of reference here is not PNG but lossless JPEG, which was the best available option in DNG before version 1.7 of the DNG spec. Lossless JPEG compresses worse (but faster) than PNG.

I don't know how HALIC works but if there is no FOSS implementation available that seems like a no-go.

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