Use of the JPEG compression algorithm is a balancing act between compressed image size and reconstructed image quality. Requesting a higher degree of compression will produce a compressed image which requires less storage space, but which will probably reconstruct with poorer quality. There is a tradeoff between compressed image size and image quality, and hence there is also a tradeoff on the Web between image downloading time and image quality.
To help illustrate this tradeoff, this page allows you to display three versions of a single image which have been compressed to greater or lesser degrees. Notice the time it takes to download and display each image. A further page shows all the different images side by side. This allows you to more easily compare the quality of the different images.
(Please note that image display time is also affected by the speed of your connection to the Internet (e.g., your modem or local area network), by the speed of your machine, including its video hardware, and by your browser's caching strategy.)
The following versions are available:
