What is a potential drawback of lossless compression compared to lossy compression?

Lossless compression is designed to reduce file size without any loss of quality, meaning that all original data can be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data. While this ensures that quality is maintained, one of the main drawbacks is that it often leads to larger file sizes compared to lossy compression methods. Lossy compression sacrifices some data and quality to achieve much smaller file sizes, making it more efficient for storage and transmission, especially in scenarios like streaming or when bandwidth is limited.

Thus, the key reason why lossless compression can result in larger files is that it retains all the image or audio information, preventing any degradation in quality. This can be a significant factor for users concerned about storage space, as the larger files from lossless methods might limit the amount of data that can be conveniently handled or stored.