[OSGeo-Discuss] Open File Formats andProprietaryAlgorithms[SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Paul Ramsey]

So hung up on wavelets, we are.

Internally tiled TIFF with JPEG compression and similarly formatted
internal overviews can achieve 10:1 compression rates without
noticeable image quality reductions, and as an added bonus can be
decompressed a heck of a lot faster than wavelet-based formats. The
wavelet stuff is k00l, in that there is no need for an overview
pyramid (it's implicit in the compression math) and much higher
compression rates can be achieved. But operationally, you can go a
long way with the more primitive (open image format + open compression
algorithm) approach.

P.