lossy

n. Degraded by a loss of information.

Notes

Lossy is used to describe digital compression techniques in which information is lost; an object is altered after being compressed and restored. Lossy compression sacrifices fidelity for size; fidelity and compressed file size are inversely proportional. The technique may be used in instances where the loss of information is not noticeable or significant. MPEG and JPEG are lossy compression algorithms.