Kornel Lesiński, of ImageOptim fame, did an excellent talk at performance.now() about image optimisation. In it, he suggested that a single-frame AV1 video could already outperform a JPG or WebP image in terms of compression ratio. With the single-frame AV1 being half the size of the JPG. I decided to verify that claim.
First, I took a reference image from Wikimedia Commons and generated a "perfect thumbnail" for it, as a PNG. PNG being losslesss, this gives us the reference to aim for. If image compression was lossless, it would end up being 100% identical to that PNG. But by definition, with JPG, WebP and AV1, we're talking about lossy compression. The main question when you use lossy compression is: how much visual quality do you lose?
The images embedded in the article are lossless PNGs generated from the mentione