Data Compression Ratio - Lossless Vs. Lossy

Lossless Vs. Lossy

Lossless compression of digitized data such as video, digitized film, and audio preserves all the information, but can rarely do much better than 1:2 compression because of the intrinsic entropy of the data. In contrast, lossy compression (for example JPEG, or MP3) can achieve much higher compression ratios at the cost of a decrease in quality, as visual or audio compression artifacts from loss of important information are introduced.