⇦ go back
bmp and png are lossless formats. Although, they can be saved as a lossy file (reduced file size). All these files look nice for color depth, except for the GIF. And that's because GIF format only allows 8 bits per pixel (compared to the others at 24 or 32).
All the images have 63,333 unique colors in them. Except the GIF image, which only has 256 unique colors in it. Therefore, the smooth gradient sky color is going to look blocky because there's not enough shades of blue.
In my opinion, good formats for the web are lossy formats (jpg, gif). Maybe even png in certain situations since it's intelligently designed.
BMP - 485 kB
PNG - 211 kB
GIF - 61 kB
JPG - 29 kB
Part 5
Why is one letter smooth, and the other one pixelated? Because you're comparing a bitmap image (raster) versus a font (vector). Vector files do not lose quality when you zoom in, while raster images do because they have a fixed # of pixels.