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Comment by sylware | Hacker News Reader

I thing the endgame is lossless PNG with 16bit color components with basic compression like gzip or at best bzip2. Or a format without the weirdness of PNG 'line based loading' which is obsolete nowdays. The "expensive part", apart from the compression algorithm, being the meta data storage without kludge.

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>without the weirdness of PNG 'line based loading' which is obsolete nowdays

How? Line-based loading is a very simple way to exploit 2D spatial coherence. A 1D format like gzip loses this advantage for minimal gain in simplicity.

You can’t just ignore signal compression algorithms unless you are fine allocating 4-5x more bandwidth to images.

I believe 7zip outdoes bzip2 these days along every metric

And lossless jpeg-xl exceeds your idea

7zip meaning what, LZMA (xz)?

Yes

and zstandard outdoes 7zip (LZMA)

not in compression density, I don't believe, but yeah, along most other metrics

These days I favour lossless WEBP instead of PNG. I often save around 30%~40% of file size compared to PNG, especially when the PNG is encoded with lots of bits per pixel (i.e 48 bits or 24 bits).

I think that’s why they were advocating for gzip or bzip2 instead of just relying on PNG’s built-in compression.

16bit PNG is simply too inefficient. If you care about high bit depth, JXL has vastly higher 32 bit ceiling with superior compression

how about lossless JPEG XL

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