Lossy Compression

« Back to Glossary Index

A compression technique that does not decompress digital data back to 100% of the original. Lossy methods can provide high degrees of compression and result in smaller compressed files, but some number of the original pixels, sound waves, or video frames are removed forever. The lossy techniques available in Acrobat Distiller (when making a PDF) are JPEG, Subsampling, Downsampling, and Bi-cubic Downsampling.