Today’s Question: Using Android Open Camera, which image mode provides better image quality, PNG or JPEG?
Tim’s Quick Answer: The PNG option will provide better image quality than the JPEG option. That also means, however, that the PNG files will generally take up considerably more storage space than the equivalent JPEG images would.
More Detail: The PNG (Portable Network Graphics) file was introduced in many respects as a higher-quality option to the JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) file format. However, the PNG file format has not seen anywhere near the wide adoption of JPEG files. Therefore, not many cameras offer PNG capture, while nearly all offer JPEG as a capture format.
If image quality is your primary concern, PNG is a better option than JPEG. Just be aware that the PNG files will be considerably larger than JPEG images, so will consume more space. That translates into not being able to capture as many PNG files as JPEG images on a given storage device.
For example, a JPEG that is around 13MB in size would translate to a PNG file of about 32MB in size. That’s a pretty significant increase in file size. In fact, in many cases a raw capture will be smaller than a PNG file, and so raw (or DNG) can be a better solution when image quality is your primary concern. A raw capture contains more bit depth, for example, with a file that will generally be smaller than an equivalent PNG file because the image data for a raw capture generally only contains one of the three RGB color values for each pixel.
