Thread with 8 posts
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AUDIOPHILE: i like the sound of vinyl. it’s warm and homely
ME: 😏 silly audiophiles. that’s just nostalgia. objectively it’s worse quality than CDs, and—
IMAGE CODEC ENGINEER: hey check out WebP and HEIC they’re way more efficient than JPEG
ME: no they look like crap… why are the images so blurry 😡
IMAGE CODEC ENGINEER: the JPEG is also blurry it just has blocking artifacts
ME: but i like the blocking artifacts. i grew up with them. they’re comfy and even if inauthentic, the noise improves the quality i perceive
ME: … wait
apologies to everyone who grew up on the internet for the realisation this might give you
this isn’t even a joke (aside from the part about being obnoxious to someone who likes vinyl, I wouldn’t actually do that), I think this is something image quality comparisons fail to account for: if you’re anything like me, JPEG looks better because it’s worse
I’m not even sure how much of it is familiarity and nostalgia, and how much of it is universal. the blocking artifacts add extra high-frequency information that does literally make the image less blurry, just in an inauthentic way. it’s kinda like adding fake film grain
@hikari I'd say it's almost universal. The "sharpness" control on televisions has been around a long time and it generally makes things look sharper while losing some actual detail.
@hikari Apple’s upscaling algorithm for zooming in on photos frequently makes me think a photo is nicer than its pixels actually show.
@hikari Also all those examples of how pixel sprites look on CRTs
@hikari Fascinating. I have noticed the blurriness issue myself. My guess is that it is caused by converter tools using PSNR as a quality metric. For video, x264 solved this by using SSIM instead.