> store small amounts of data ... as graphical designs ... on pieces of ordinary printer paper? You mean, printing out a picture? ... Joking aside, if you to

> store small amounts of data ... as graphical designs ... on pieces of ordinary printer paper? You mean, printing out a picture? ... Joking aside, if you tolerate lossy "compression", it'd be interesting to see what the characteristics of printing an image are in terms of image codec metrics. I guess the comparison would be with the "decoded" result, which'd be the raw output of the scanner. With modern equipment, it'd certainly be much higher quality than a JPEG encoded at the (albeit conservative) ~200 kB estimates given for the lossless formats. This would also be a rare codec where future increases in decoder technology can actually increase the quality of the decoded output, assuming that the printer and scanner currently have similar DPI. I wonder whether that applies still to historical film photos or if digital scanners have already surpassed the resolution of the original media to the point of saturation. Would being able to "subsample" individual film grains allow extracting a tiny bit more detail?