I was also able to reproduce the original post's JPG distortion result using Pixlr (not just GIMP). Here's the 1920x1200 JPG compressed at 0% quality (resultin

I was also able to reproduce the original post's JPG distortion result using Pixlr (not just GIMP). Here's the 1920x1200 JPG compressed at 0% quality (resulting file is ~60KB) and subsequently uploaded to Imgur. http://imgur.com/dZN2B http://imgur.com/dZN2B At such a high degree of compression, Jpeg wouldn't be able to get to any level of quality because it boils down to a pixelation in the size of 8x8 (or 16x16). You'd definitely needs a different kind of compression to preserve quality at such high level of compression. Realistically, many image editors offer default compression at 80% so the artefacts are less visible. I don't know how WebP cocmpare to Jpeg at the 80% setting.