JPEG 2000 is an image standard published in 2000 by the same committee behind JPEG. It was meant to replace JPEG with better compression and advanced features. It never displaced JPEG on the web, but it became a standard in fields where quality and very large images matter.
How JPEG 2000 works
Instead of JPEG’s 8 × 8 pixel blocks, JPEG 2000 uses a wavelet transform, which describes the whole image at several resolutions at once. This avoids blocky artefacts at high compression, supports true lossless mode, and lets software decode only the part or resolution it needs, which is ideal for zooming into enormous images.
Where JPEG 2000 is used
- Digital cinema: films are distributed to cinemas as JPEG 2000 frames
- Libraries and archives: scanned books, maps and newspapers
- Medical imaging, inside DICOM files
- Satellite and aerial imagery
- Some PDFs, which embed JPEG 2000 images
What it’s good at
- Better quality than JPEG at the same size, without blocking artefacts
- Lossless compression in the same format
- Efficient access to huge images at any zoom level
Where it falls short
- Very limited support in browsers, phones, photo apps and websites
- Slower to encode and decode than JPEG
- Complex, with many profiles and options
JP2 and other formats
To view or share a JPEG 2000 image, convert JP2 to JPG; for a lossless copy, use the image converter to save it as PNG or TIFF.