Totally understood, and I'm well aware of the increased memory footprint required once they are uncompressed.
Way back in 08 when I was working on my first iPhone app you had to be very careful with memory a small animation with 120 images of 50k each could quickly max out the 50mb of usable memory the iPhone 3G had unless you cashed properly and released assets as soon as they were not in use. I should have been more specific in my original post.