Lossy. Lossless. What the heck is the difference? After listening to close to two hours of lectures mentioning the topic, I couldn't tell you.
When breaking down the words by their pre/post fixes, you can begin to understand what lossless means.
Main Entry: loss Pronunciation: \ˈlȯs\ Function: noun 1 : decrease in amount, magnitude, or d.egree
Main Entry: -less Function: adjective suffix 1 : destitute of : not having less> less>
So pretty clearly, lossless= not having any decreased in amount.
Lossy on the other hand, doesn't have as clear etymological roots. It turns out that lossy, in contrast to lossless, means that the file does lose some parts. Files saved in a lossy format remove sections in order to decrease file size but not enough to have a noticeable difference to the user.
A lossless file doesn't compress files the way lossy files do, but reorganizes them for easier digital transmission. If there are sections of a file that are repeated, an algorithm finds colors, sounds, etc. that are the same, and creates code so it only uses one of the repeated sections over and over again. I found this explanation of lossy vs. lossless made it much more clear to me.
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