I ran benchmarks comparing PNG, AVIF, HEIF, JPEG XL, and WebP for lossless compression of graphics images. Tested with 14 images.
The results are also available in a TXT file:
https://op111.net/files/2025/10/op111-20251015-png-modern-fo...
...and in a Google Sheets document:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mwaHeIsDrNhE3NTKtszK...
Cheers!
My own interest is in publishing images that I took with my DSLR and having them look like images I took from my DSLR. People like to show me
https://jakearchibald.com/2020/avif-has-landed/
to prove I'm wrong. It's true that the AVIF image is small doesn't have the obvious blocking artifacts that JPEG and WebP but if you look really close at the reflections on the upper wing of the car it looks like the AVIF just made up some probable-looking blobs of light that don't look that much like the original if you look really closely.
The thing is a video codec doesn't have to be good for images. For instance a single frame of a VHS video looks atrocious but an actual video on VHS isn't that bad.
When I tried to use AVIF to make files of the quality I wanted, I didn't see a clear benefit over WebP and to the contrary I came to the conclusion that WebP was a good drop-in replacement for JPEF for my application. If I wanted to make a big splash image for my web site that didn't have to hold up to close inspection though, AVIF's compression ratio is really high.
My interest in doing the benchmarks was the other thing:
Seeing what the options are these days for the types of image PNG was designed for.
As the results started accumulating, I wasn’t sure I should include all formats in the post and in the TXT file and the spreadsheet, because testing them at what they were not designed for did not seem fair.
Do you think I should add something stronger or more prominent to my intro to explain this?
For most purposes where I might use a PNG I might use a lossless WebP now because it seems like lossless WebP beats PNG pretty solidly. My take also is that WebP is a good JPEG replacement.
JPEG XL usually does better but practically that doesn't matter much because I think the only web browser that supports it is Safari
https://caniuse.com/?search=jpeg+xl
Of course there is a lot of politics around JPEG XL, specifically Google doesn't want us to have it and they're a monopolist so we can't have it. If there is any chance we're going to change that we're going to have document that JPEG XL really is better than the alternatives and your article does that.