Re:We are now Solar Powered
by htk on Sunday September 26, 2021 @08:41AM
(#28660433)
What caught my attention the most was the usage of 1-bit images. Clever restrain of resource usage, and interesting in its own right.
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Because of dithering, that photo is 50kB, jpeg could easily have the same size and look much better.
Exactly. Dithering creates a lot of noise and PNG is poor choice to compress that.
Re:We are now Solar Powered
by shadowfaxRodeo on Sunday September 26, 2021 @07:15PM
(#28665509)
it's the opposite way round. png is especially good at compressing dithered images.
It's a reduced color palette, (in this case just black and white) so there's lots of repeated sequences. Which works very well with lossless compression.
Re:We are now Solar Powered
by Sophistifunk on Sunday September 26, 2021 @08:59PM
(#28666029)
And yet, a 50kb JPG would look much better.
Re:We are now Solar Powered
by eldersnake on Sunday September 26, 2021 @09:03PM
(#28666064)
Dithered images won't be for everyone. I'm sure if I shrunk down a full colour JPEG to a very small size I could have used those rather than my dithered images, but I figure I could have a bit extra size (dimensions) with the dithered images. Also, yeah, I was totally going for the Solar version of Low Tech Magazine's aesthetic too...
It reminded me of the images on https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com
For example https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/dithers/Garthsnaid_-_SLV_H...
This photo kind of looks like a halftone printing scan to me. In case that it actually isn't, maybe that was just the intention.
The main site (https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ as opposed to https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/) has normal images (for example https://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e888330282e1...), so I assume it's a deliberate choice to go with the low-tech aesthetic (while having practical benefits around bandwidth and so on).