Lossless Compression | 2.5 | OCR GCSE Computer Science | J277

5 flashcards

Lossless compression

The reduction of a file's size without permanently removing data.

Advantage - How does lossless compression work?

When a file is decompressed, the file is returned to its original form, resulting in no reduction of quality. It can be recompressed any number of times without any loss of quality.

Advantage - Why is lossless compression good for text and software files?

If data was permanently removed, the file would become incomprehensible - lossless compression does not permanently remove data.

Disadvantage - File size

Because there is no permanent removal of data, the file size will be larger than if lossy compression was used.

Disadvantage - Why does lossless compression take longer to compress than lossy compression?

Because lossless compression uses more complex algorithms to compress a file.