Pictures - JPEG (Poorly Compressible)

Compression Rate

We see the most surprising upset in this fileset. The extremely fussy StuffIt was supreme at this fileset. Even for this super-tough fileset, it managed to reduce the archive size by over 40MB or 20%. Very, very impressive! Even its closest contender, WinRK, could only reduce the size of the archive by 5MB (2.5%).

Generally, most of the compressors were abysmal at this fileset, achieving compression rates of less than 1%. The worst compressor was WinAce. It only managed to compress the fileset by 0.2%, saving only 479KB of space.

Compression Speed

The speed leader in this test was again, gzip. It was able to compress JPEG files at speeds close to 14MB/s. WinZip and ARJ32 were close behind, at 11MB/s and 10MB/s respectively.

While StuffIt (which produced the incredibly small archive in this fileset) was slow in this test, it was not the slowest. WinRK has that dubious honour again. It took over 18 minutes to complete the task. That makes him almost 8X slower than StuffIt.

Compression Efficiency

The compression efficiency rating is a simple way to evaluate the efficiency of each data compressor. This way, we can see which compressor can save the most space in the least time.

Please note that a higher efficiency rating does not mean the compressor is better. It just means the compressor has a better compression-to-speed ratio. A more efficient compressor is, of course, always more desirable than a less efficient one.

The efficiency champions in this test was undeniably StuffIt by a really massive margin. Its amazing compression rate more than made up for its poor compression speed. It was more than 5X more efficient than its nearest contender, gzip.

Many of other compressors were rather inefficient at compressing JPEG files, with WinAce as the most inefficient. It was poor at compression and also very slow. Surprisingly, WinRK, which was over 5.7X slower than WinAce still managed to edge past it in efficiency.