JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group.
It's a lossy compressed format supporting
24-bit, over 16 million colors.
Use it for full-color and grey scale naturalistic images;
use JPEG when the image has at least 16 colors.
JPEG is not good for small, detailed text or images with hard edges.
The JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) standard is excellent
for most realistic images (photos for example, but not line drawings
or logos).
It uses a powerful, though nominally "lossy", compression method.
JPEG is best suited for truecolor original images; avoid using it
on images that have already been forced into a 256-color palette.
Using JPEG for a photographic image for example can produce 10:1
savings compared to GIF, as well as permitting much better display
quality on truecolor-capable displays.
Netscape handles inline JPEG; some older browsers need to use an
external JPEG viewer.
The particular format usually used for JPEG-compressed images on
the Web is JFIF. This is distinct from a JPEG compressed PICT file,
which is often referred to as 'a JPEG file' on the Macintosh platform.
A newer format called SPIFF is under development; when released,
it is expected to be compatible with JFIF readers.
Although the "baseline" variety of JPEG is believed patent-free,
there are many patents associated with some optional features of JPEG,
namely arithmetic coding and hierarchical storage.
For this reason, these optional features are never used on the Web.
