Yes Clive a number of things will click into place once you get an understanding of what is going on inside the black box. Of course in some applications such a medical images chroma down sampling is undesirable because the wanted information is in the colour so images should not be stored in the jpeg format. Just out of interest jpeg does have a lossless method but the compression ratios are nothing to write home about compared to the Baseline (Standard) method I am describing.
I am glad a number of you are interested and managing to follow what can be a complex subject. All we need to do is grasp the concepts applied to get an idea why some images compress better than others.
Part of my degree profile was to spend a year on telecoms. The data encoding and decoding aspect I found fascinating.
The boffins who worked on complex ciphers used in secret messages we have to thank for some of the concepts developed. Other concepts are very mathematical and abstract.
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