JPG vs PNG Quality: Which Actually Looks Better?

"Which has better quality, JPG or PNG?" sounds like it should have a one-word answer, but the honest answer is: it depends entirely on the image. PNG is lossless. It stores every pixel exactly, so its quality is never anything less than perfect. JPG is lossy. It deliberately discards detail the eye barely notices to make files far smaller. That means PNG is always technically higher quality, but for the right kind of image, JPG can look completely identical while weighing a fraction as much.

The image type is what decides whether the difference is visible. On photographs (smooth gradients, natural textures, millions of subtly varying colors) JPG's discarded detail is genuinely invisible at good quality settings, so PNG's perfection buys you nothing but a bigger file. On graphics with hard edges and text (screenshots, logos, line art) JPG's compression produces telltale fuzzy 'artifacts' and color smearing around the edges, and PNG's crispness is very obviously better.

There's also a hidden quality trap in JPG called generation loss: every time you re-save a JPG, it re-compresses and loses a little more, so edited-and-resaved JPGs degrade over time. PNG never does this. Below, we break down exactly where each format's quality wins, so you can stop guessing and pick correctly.