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CBR is a RAR archive renamed, containing sequentially ordered images for comic book reading. It's functionally identical to CBZ but uses RAR compression instead of ZIP. The format was popular when WinRAR was ubiquitous and RAR's better compression mattered for trading comic scans over slow internet connections.
Today, CBZ (ZIP-based) is preferred. ZIP opens natively on every OS. RAR requires third-party software. The compression difference is negligible for JPEG images, which are already compressed. New comic scanners and publishers overwhelmingly use CBZ. CBR persists in older digital comic collections.
The same comic readers handle both formats: CDisplayEx, YACReader, Panels, and Calibre all open CBR files. To convert CBR to CBZ, extract the RAR archive, then re-zip the images with a .cbz extension. The image quality is unchanged — only the archive format differs.