Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by adgjlsfhk1 1235 days ago
Not really. QOI's opcodes are very specifically designed based on the characteristics of 8 bit images. For example, there is an 8 bit opcode for a run of up to 64 identical pixels. This makes a lot of sense for an 8 bit image, but is a lot less likely to appear in a 16 bit picture. For a 16 bit photo, the minimal QOI modification would almost certainly be worse than uncompressed since noise in the sensor will prevent any of the 8 bit opcodes from working.
1 comments

RLE doesn't really work for photos even at 8 bit depth, the noise is noticeable even there. It's mainly useful for drawn/rendered content, where solid colored areas are far more common. That won't be much different at 16 bit depth.
A possibly better example for photos would be the 8 bit tag that says a pixel is within -2 to +1 in each of RGB. In 8 bit, there are a lot of cases where this is a big enough range to capture the noise of a static color (and or a gradient). In a 16 bit image, a lot of the time there might be 3-4 bits of noise which will mean that the tag is a lot less useful.