The examples are just bad. If you want to show something, screenshot and enlarge it to show the artifacts.
The difference is in color around the edges of the picture in the background change noticeably on a non-fullscreen image on my Android 12 device.
Yes! Where's the red underlines and diffs? I can see the background banding, but the foreground looks the same at a glance except that some of them look ambiguously "off" in ways that could just be placebo.
You'd think a visual artist would be more interested in visual communication and not just a wall of text with un-annotated photos.
After that it was pretty obvious what the author is talking about.
WebP image gradients just looked broken (posterized) except the lossless one, which was (obviously) perfect.
One might argue that if you need to enlarge it to see the artifacts, then the artifacts aren't perceptible enough and the codec is already good enough for the use case.
That's a weird thing to say unless the pixel density is your one and only measure. Regardless of that, the posterization should be perfectly visible on a 2012 FullHD monitor, or even a 1366x768 TN screen of a decade-old laptop. Most commenters here are probably viewing the pictures on a scale different from 1:1.
Is it though? We now have OLED TVs and OLED smartphones.
Where's our OLED PC monitors?
On every measure, if you care about colors/contrast/black+white levels/resolution/density, the average computer monitor has fallen far behind.
You can't even buy a smartphone that has a panel half as bad as most PC monitors on the market. And, at least in my area, you'd actually have to go to a lot of effort to find a non-4k TV.
https://www.displayninja.com/oled-monitor-list/
Mainly targeted towards the gaming market at the moment.
- Framerate - Response time - Adaptive sync - (how prone to burn-in is OLED? Monitors often have way more static images to TVs)
I assume combing these all might just make it more expensive than just individually each feature
The much more complicated electronics plus Supply & Demand. Demand for TVs should be way higher then for high end monitors.
https://computers.scorptec.com.au/computer/Oled-Monitor
They've been around for years.
PC monitors have been improving constantly with high refresh rates, local dimming HDR + 10 bit color, adaptive sync, OLED and more.
There is a difference in the gradients of color. One hasn't the guy looking backlit and one doesn't.
Wait... I agree for JPG but if you use lossless WEBP instead of PNG, isn't it simply the same pixels, just with a file about 30% smaller than the corresponding PNG file? (and 15% smaller compared to already heavily optimized PNG files like when using zopfli/optipng/etc.).
Isn't the "lossless" in "lossless WEBP" actually lossless when converting a PNG file to WEBP?
FWIW when you convert losslessly a PNG to WEBP, then decompress the WEBP back to a PNG file, then convert again that PNG back to a WEBP file, you get the exact same lossless WEBP file. It's also the same WEBP you get when you encode losslessly from either a PNG or that same PNG but "crushed" with a PNG optimizer.
On the technical side, webp support still isn't like png. Tried dragging a webp into Google Slides just now, got "unsupported image type," which is ironic. I'll try again in like 10 years.
Oh that's a good point.
I see lossless WEBP mostly as a way to save bandwith where PNG would have been used. If you've got a pipeline where, anyway, you already "crush" your PNG file, you may as well also generate a lossless WEBP file and serve that: all browsers support it. And you can fall back on the optimized PNG should the browser not support WEBP.
I mean: I use WEBP, but only lossless WEBP, as a replacement for PNG when I'd serve PNG files to browsers.
But for that one usecase: showing a PNG file in a webpage, I don't see that many downsides to lossless WEBP. It saves bandwith.
Also, if users download your images and use them elsewhere, webp will still be more annoying for them. Though it's not very common that you want them doing that anyway.
Any updated (modern) browser should be able to see webp just fine, I'd rather just serve it without a backup plan if I'm planning to have webp in my website.
So I don't think display quality really is the problem here. Maybe the drivers, or post-processing filters. Or maybe everyone doesn't have an eye for this. I have an interest in image processing, and that's the kind of detail one tends to notice with experience. The author of the article is undoubtedly more experienced than me and noticing these details may even be part of his job. He most likely will be able to notice these problems on crappy monitors, as well as telling you in which way that monitor is crap.
Generally though i would expect wide gaumet monitors to make a significant difference for these types of artifacts
The "issue" is that monitors last a LONG time. And thats good. We dont touch them or fiddle with them. They tend to just work. Phones and shit we keep dropping and breaking, then the battery gets bad.
Also for gaming you may even want 1080p 200hz monitor for high refresh rate and FPS over pixel density.
They really don't...
Recently I’ve been dabbling in HDR video, but I realised that the exercise is futile because I can’t send the results to anyone — unless they’re using an Apple device.
I just looked at the first two images of the post.
First on two mid end LCDs: one ASUS IPS from this year and one BenQ TN from 2012, both 24" 1920x1080 (~91 DPI). The difference between the images is clear on both.
And before posting, to make sure, I pulled out a 15" 1024x768 (~85 DPI: basically the same) NEC TN LCD from 2002. And a NEC CRT roughly 15" viewable 1024x768 from 1998. Both on VGA connectors (so there is the typical noise from that, which still doesn't cover up the posterization). The difference between the images is clear on both.
All monitors viewed from 3' away.
People are simply accommodated to poor image quality, including posterization. AAA FPS video games display it on static art backgrounds in the loading menu, and I can never tell if they are intended. Show them a 240Hz monitor with 30ms input lag and 5 frames of overshoot artifacts and viewing angles worse than 1998, and they'll be wowed.
I think the real problem is, like many of the commenters here, most people can't tell the difference because desktop monitors have been stuck in a deadzone of zero innovation for the last 10 years. I'm sure half the folks here are viewing his example images on a 2012-era HD 1920x1080 LCD, which is definitely part of the problem.
It's bizarre. Smaller displays (Mobile phones) and larger displays (4k TVs) have fantastic pixel densities now considering their viewing distance. However any panel in the range of 20"-40" is stuck in the mid-2000s.
Also, I think the author would have done us a favor by using example photos with lighter backgrounds (or changing the background color of his post to black). The harshness of the black images on white don't allow the eye to adjust enough to see the issue. If you put those images on a dark background its super easy to tell the difference.