Cell is a compression technique developed by Sun Microsystems. The compression algorithms, the bit stream definition, and the decompression algorithms are open; that is, Sun will tell anybody who is interested about them. Cell compression is similar to MPEG and H.261 in that there is a lot of room for value-add on the compressor end. Getting the highest quality image from a given bit count at a reasonable amount of computation is an art. In addition the bit-stream completely defines the compression format and defines what the decoder must do and there is less art in the decoder. There are two flavors of Cell: the original called Cell or CellA, and a newer flavor called CellB.