Someone remarked that in film photography, every 10 years, Kodak used to get the brilliant idea that 35mm film is just too complicated for Your Average Consumer, and invented a new “easy to load” cartridge based film format. 126 Instamatic in the 1960s, 110 Pocket Instamatic in the 1970s, Disc Film in the 1980s and the APS in the 1990s. …Meanwhile, Your Average Consumer didn’t give much damn, and while these formats saw some use, most people preferred 35mm.
Same goes with image formats. Apple and Google and Microsoft try to make “better” file formats happen, and I’m sure they have their advantages, but people will stick with JPEG, thanks.
It’s not “people” who are causing the proliferation of formats like webp though, it’s the web industry.
If you are a web platform, you want a format that gives you acceptable quality for the smallest size to reduce your bandwidth. You also want one that loads as fast as possible from a CPU prospective, so your site renders as fast as possible.
These are factors webp was designed for.
To your point, for home users jpeg remains a good-enough choice with no reason to change it. A preferred choice even, due to broad legacy compatibility. But we aren’t seeing proliferation of webp because people are at home willingly going “file -> export as -> webp” - no, we’re seeing it because industry is converting uploads to it, and people are saving those images.
an easy choice when you consider disc cameras had terrible resolution; the instamatic at least had 35mm frames and were tremendously popular with non-photographers - think the cop that needs to take a picture of some trash - for a decade +…
and there was just so much 35mm gear available everywhere. a friend has 2 entire nikon kits from his dad’s tour in vietnam, with some classic telephoto and specialty lenses and filters, he bought it on a lark while visiting singapore on leave.
Someone remarked that in film photography, every 10 years, Kodak used to get the brilliant idea that 35mm film is just too complicated for Your Average Consumer, and invented a new “easy to load” cartridge based film format. 126 Instamatic in the 1960s, 110 Pocket Instamatic in the 1970s, Disc Film in the 1980s and the APS in the 1990s. …Meanwhile, Your Average Consumer didn’t give much damn, and while these formats saw some use, most people preferred 35mm.
Same goes with image formats. Apple and Google and Microsoft try to make “better” file formats happen, and I’m sure they have their advantages, but people will stick with JPEG, thanks.
It’s not “people” who are causing the proliferation of formats like webp though, it’s the web industry.
If you are a web platform, you want a format that gives you acceptable quality for the smallest size to reduce your bandwidth. You also want one that loads as fast as possible from a CPU prospective, so your site renders as fast as possible.
These are factors webp was designed for.
To your point, for home users jpeg remains a good-enough choice with no reason to change it. A preferred choice even, due to broad legacy compatibility. But we aren’t seeing proliferation of webp because people are at home willingly going “file -> export as -> webp” - no, we’re seeing it because industry is converting uploads to it, and people are saving those images.
an easy choice when you consider disc cameras had terrible resolution; the instamatic at least had 35mm frames and were tremendously popular with non-photographers - think the cop that needs to take a picture of some trash - for a decade +…
and there was just so much 35mm gear available everywhere. a friend has 2 entire nikon kits from his dad’s tour in vietnam, with some classic telephoto and specialty lenses and filters, he bought it on a lark while visiting singapore on leave.