Hacker News Reader

Comment by htk | Hacker News Reader

What caught my attention the most was the usage of 1-bit images. Clever restrain of resource usage, and interesting in its own right.

View on HN

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.

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.

And yet, a 50kb JPG would look much better.

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).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com