JPEG Quality Levels

Does the JPEG Quality Matter?

When saving the snaphots in JPEG, one can choose the image quality anywhere between lossless (100%) and really grungy (0%). Just for completeness of these pages, here are the effects.

All photos below come from the same high-quality original that has been taken under halogen lighting, at the distance of 8.6" from the subject, and then reduced 33% and saved at varying quality levels.

Note: to view this page, you really need a monitor capable of displaying thousands of colors, and a 24-bit color setting is is highly recommended.

My concusion: 50% JPEG quality is just fine for most purposes.

Quality set to 0. The resulting file is only 4.4 kB.	Quality set to 10%. Slightly larger than its neighbor (4.5kB), but looks just as bad.
Quality set to 25%. Still sucks, particularly the wall behind the plant. File length: 5.3kB.	Quality set to 50%. Now we are getting somewhere, except the wall still looks a bit grungy. Low lighting (fixed in post-processing) is partially to blame. The size doubled to 10.7kB.
Quality set to 75%. We're getting somewhere now, but he size doubled again, to 21.9kB.	Losless - 100%. Yes, so its quite a bit better, but it takes 36.6.kB.

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