Unless the OP is using a 8K monitor with professional color grading, I don't understand how he can say that some of these pictures are "looking like shit". They all look exactly the same to me on my regular 27" 1080p, on my 27" 2K or on my iPhone.
WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
21–30 of 411 posts
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#22I opened the first two pictures in separate tabs and switched quickly between them. There is zero difference. Tried it on two different monitors, Chrome and Firefox. Same with the pictures of the guy at the end. EDIT: The last comparison is webp twice, he linked it wrong. Here is the jpg one, still no difference: https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/20...
It could be partially placebo affect. Its not like he is doing a blinded test.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#23I know this is not constructive and I'm sorry, but I just can't read the text with those st and ct ligatures. It makes me feel like the author is trolling with them and I shouldn't take the text seriously. I know that's an exaggeration but that's what the design makes me feel.
But why to draw hairs between all 'ct' and 'st'? As a non-native speaker, is that some English weirdness that I have yet to learn about?
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#24This seems to be in the same spirit as audiophiles claiming they can hear the difference between various speaker cables, or the "hints of dark chocolate" in wine tasting.
Personally I see zero differences in the images on that page and unless the author has some really super-human vision abilities (possible! but unlikely) my guess is he doesn't either. WebP looks perfectly fine to me.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#25I know this is not constructive and I'm sorry, but I just can't read the text with those st and ct ligatures. It makes me feel like the author is trolling with them and I shouldn't take the text seriously. I know that's an exaggeration but that's what the design makes me feel.
But why to draw hairs between all 'ct' and 'st'? As a non-native speaker, is that some English weirdness that I have yet to learn about?
It's how English was written in the "olden times". At that time, little flairs (such as ligatures) were pretty common, and were very fanciful. Some simpler ligatures (like ff) survive today, but embellished ones (like ct) were toned down. It's just a stylistic choice to draw them one way or another, but it's jarring to see the fancier ones in "modern" texts because we're used to the simpler styles.
Fun fact: The German "eszsett" (ß; U+00DF) is a ligature for "ss" (specifically the "long s"[0] and a normal "s") that evolved over time to be one "letter".[1]
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#26It seems I have an uneducated eye by their standards, because I barely see any difference, which I'm happy to admit, but I think the author misses the point of webp completely.
The format is intended to bring down the file size of graphics in general, not high-level photography which accounts for probably 0.5% of the images on the internet.
This is a case of the best daily driver car won't be good enough for a race car driver.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#27I dont get it. The author seems to care highly about image quality, but also wants to squeeze out as many bytes as possible? Bandwidth is cheap. If we are talking about photography as art, why would you be trying to scrap a few kb off in the first place?
Because not all countries have cheap or unlimited bandwidth
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#28It's such a shame Google decided to block adoption of JPEG XL: it's a strict improvement over classic JPEG (you can losslessly reencode JPEG to JXL and reduce the size, due to a better entropy coder in JXL!) and JXL has various other upgrades compared to 'classic' JPEG. In the meantime, let's hope AVIF or whatever manages to pick up the slack, and/or other browsers decide en masse to support JPEG XL anyway; that woul…
I must admit, I'm not sure why JPEG XL is viewed so favourably on HN, it's not something I know a ton about, but my understanding is that the big advantage of AVIF is that you can reuse hardware decoders built into devices for AV1 for the images. It being a strict improvement over JPEG is nice for the developers not having to go back to the source image for an upgrade, but that seems like a pretty small benefit that…
JPEG XL is viewed favorably on HN because it's the underdog to evil Google. Before they wrote their complaint article about Chrome removing support (after significant time of noone using the format), noone here gave it a thought. It's not like anyone is attacking Firefox for not enabling it either.
This is not a format quality thing, this is "let's have a chance to complain about Google" thing again ;)
I mean, this whole posted blog is doing a comparison on a single image. Anyone with a bit of thought would dismiss this as ridiculous in first second... but there's the Google name and the HN haters are out of the woods.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#29I opened the first two pictures in separate tabs and switched quickly between them. There is zero difference. Tried it on two different monitors, Chrome and Firefox. Same with the pictures of the guy at the end. EDIT: The last comparison is webp twice, he linked it wrong. Here is the jpg one, still no difference: https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/20...
It could be partially placebo affect. Its not like he is doing a blinded test.
It's not, it's just that people who spend thousands of dollars and hours into photography are more susceptible to care. Same with music, most people are fine with $15 earphones while musicians or music enthusiasts will find them disgusting.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#30This article didn't go into the biggest problem with webp for me: the inconveninence of the format outside the browser compared to the small space saving. There are better formats (the video-codec inspired ones like heif, avif, and what might come out of h266, or even jpeg-xl), and webp just seems like a compromise without enough upside.