On January 18, co-creator of JPEG XL, Jon Sneyers, tweeted, “It looks like Samsung’s Galaxy S24 is going to ship with JPEG XL support, using it as a lossless or visually lossless “Expert RAW” format in its camera/gallery apps!”
For those unfamiliar with Jon, he’s the senior image researcher at Cloudinary who has been researching image compression and image processing for years, and, along with Jyrki Alakuijala and Luca Versari, et al., is one the co-creators of the JPEG XL image format.
For those unfamiliar with JPEG XL, it’s a royalty-free raster graphics file format that supports both lossy and lossless compression. JPEG XL features up to 32 bits per color component, wide color gamut, and HDR. The compression technology behind JPEG XL, based on Google’s PIK and Cloudinary’s FLIF (Free Lossless Image Format), officially standardized the file format and coding system in 2022. Recently, Adobe added JPEG XL as a payload codec to its DNG 1.7 camera raw file format.
The announcement that Samsung Company has added support for DNG 1.7, including JPEG XL, into the camera app included with Galaxy S24 smartphones is important to developers for a number of reasons. Chief among them, JPEG XL codec is royalty-free and offers open reference implementation under the BSD license. Most attractive of all, JPEG XL provides approximately 60% size savings when compared to original JPEG at the same perceptual quality. Other companies and projects that support the format are Apple, Facebook, Adobe, Serif (Affinity), Intel, The GuardianShopify, Krita, Gimp, ImageMagick, libvips, ffmpeg, the Free Software Foundation, and, of course, Cloudinary.
