This is simply not correct. Anyone can get a passable image with that bit size. You're trying to stipulate "image pixel size" as some kind of inviolate thing, when it's not in reality. In reality, web content authors don't do insane things with their compression settings (I mean seriously: how would you even produce this? Standard conversion tools, for obvious reasons, will never emit an image like this). This isn't a real argument. This is cheating.
> it would look like a blurry smear,
Assuming facts not in evidence. The image in h.265 is plenty smeary already, FWIW. I think we both know that if this were true, the spin in the link would have done that instead of cheating with macroblock resolution. But in fact the blurry smear looks just fine, so they had to cheat.
https://i.imgur.com/t8GWPxX.jpg
It looks like garbage. It would still look like garbage if you resized it to some different size and used the appropriate level of JPEG compression to get a 26 kb image. JPEG just isn’t good enough to make this image workable for 1300x900 pixel output using only 26 kb.
Sigh. Not like the garbage in the link above it doesn't. If this was the image in the link we all would have nodded and said "yup, looks about worth a doubling of byte count" and we'd all be in agreement.
Instead, the absurdist misencoded nonsense above gets thrown around as proof that BPG is some kind of revolutionary technology, and a bunch of us have to step in to debunk the silliness.
It's twice as efficient (roughly). Just say that and leave the spin.
I find it amazing that you seem to be adding in all sorts of nonsense about scaling images and filtering and such. It's not relevant to the discussion about at X filesize and res JPEG looks appalling and BPG looks pretty passable.
This is the widest distance between the two formats for sure, but if you want large hires images at very small file sizes BPG is a pretty nice format. As I go on to say the savings are outweighed by the cost of including the decoder plugin and the probably battery and memory cost this incurs.
The point is rather that you could make a passable image of this bitrate using the better codec. It opens up a new level of compression not possible with JPEG.
If you downsampled the JPEG enough to get the same bitrate without blocking artifacts, it would look like a blurry smear, which is better than a bunch of 8x8 flat blocks but not that much better.
Maybe it would be worth including an additional JPEG downsampled-compressed-decompressed-upsampled view. You’d be able to see that jumping through those hoops doesn’t really give satisfactory results.