Lossless.

A digital file compression method which examines a file - say, an image - and reduces its overall file size by searching out repetitive patterns and compressing them. The final file size is smaller than the original but preserves its contents exactly - no information is thrown out.

The downside is that lossless compression cannot create filesizes as small as can lossy compression. This is particularly the case with photographs or images with a lot of continuous tone data. Such images can look almost random to a lossless compression program and so patterns are hard to find. TIFF and GIF are both digital image file formats which can employ lossless compression.

cf. TIFF, GIF, lossy.

Entry last updated 2002-04-03. Term 737 of 1487.

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