Reading 5 - Katherine Martin

    

  I really enjoyed Cory Arcangel's article about compression. I have never really thought about what makes up a JPEG file smaller so it was a new idea to me. I've always understood compression like zip files, but  I never really knew JPEGs were just Lossy compressed data. It was interesting to here what the two types of compression are. The first type Arcangel talked about was Lossless compression. In order to explain what Lossless compression was Arcangel used a great example. He said Lossless works like wanting to transfer "a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, b, a," to someone over the phone that instead of saying each individual letter, instead you say "nine a's, one b, one a".  Lossless compression is nice because you don't loss any of the information unlike the second type of compression; Lossy.        

         Lossy compression actually loses data when it compresses, and because of this it cannot be used for text. I think it’s interesting that our eyes don’t notice the lost data. I feel like because our eyes are so advanced that they would be able to pick up lost data when looking at an image. Arcangel brought up the fact that because we don’t notice the loss of data “crappy images” are being used in ads, digital cameras, digital video, etc. Arcangel also said that all JPEG’s have a “crappy compressed blocky” look, but in my experience I haven’t ever really thought JPEG’s were that bad. For the most part JPEGs are successful transferring data even though some of it is lost, because if they weren’t they wouldn’t be so widely used. I think images aren’t blocky or pixelated simply because they’re JPEGs, but instead they look that way because they’re blow up larger than they should be or overly manipulated somehow.