We’ve moved from AVC to HEVC and VP9 relatively quickly, but for some reason images are stuck in JPEG, PNG, and GIF despite newer formats like JPEG2000 and HEIC having been around for years? Videos are just images displayed very quickly, shouldn’t the adoption pace of image/video formats be similar?
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JPEG is simple and fast and good enough for a lot of purposes. By contrast, the sheer size of video files meant that it took a long time to get to “good enough” so there was much more motivation to keep pushing new tech out to consumers.
It has a lot of problems which make it unsatisfactory for fine art, scientific, medical or similar precision work but these are less common uses:
JPEG is always lossy due to rounding errors in the algorithm and it doesn’t support HDR, which is essential when working with wide gamuts.
JPEG2000 fixed these major issues as well as improving the compression ratio and artifact generation and providing more flexibility for multichannel (CMYK or scientific hyperspectral images) as well as handling giant images as tiles. However, at the time of release, the whole technological area of wavelet transformation was swarming with patent sharks so few companies dared to support it and those that did charged a ton of money for the support. It also required huge amounts of CPU time – early versions of the software were as much as 100x slower than regular JPEG, which meant that a file which would take 1 second to load in JPEG format, could take over a minute to load in JPEG2000 format.
Now that we have more storage capacity there is less need for discerning users to use JPEG2000. Camera raw files and TIFF files provide the necessary features.
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