Comparing different encodings (JPEG, x264, and WebP) of a reference image, she stated that the quality of the WebP-encoded result was the worst of the three, mostly because of blurriness on the image. [...] In October 2013, Josh Aas from Mozilla Research published a comprehensive study of current lossy encoding techniques and was not able to conclude that WebP outperformed JPEG by any significant margin

All while having significantly increased complexity. The blurriness problem was inherited from the video codec webp was based on. When you can't beat an 18 years old format, don't be surprised when people get irritated when you use your position to get it mandated into a standard, while later stalling actual improvements (JPEG XL).

[–] lemmyknow@lemmy.today 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Is JXL in actual use? Is it supported? I reckon it's quite new, innit? D'you happen to.know how it compares to its peers?

[–] Laser@feddit.org 19 points 1 week ago

It's not supported by either Chromium or Firefox, which is part of the issue (Google basically decided against it with arguments that are much better suited against WebP, which they pushed some years ago).

There aren't that many static image codec comparisons, for example there is https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/image-comparison/. https://afontenot.github.io/image-formats-comparison/ doesn't even include WebP because the test suite uses features unsupported by it (YUV 4:4:4). In the ones I do find, WebP usually wins against good JPEG at low bitrates, but loses on high bitrates because of the blurriness issue. They both get beaten by JPEG XL and AVIF. Which one is better probably depends on whom you ask. The before linked comparison prefers JPEG XL by a slim margin, https://tonisagrista.com/blog/2023/jpegxl-vs-avif/ strongly favors JPEG XL.