The discrete cosine-III transform (DC3T) is the same as the discrete symmetric cosine transform (DSCT) with a specific preprocessing of input data. It has less computational complexity than the discrete cosine transform (DCT) in terms of multiplications. The DC3T is also related to the DCT by a weighting matrix. The performance of the DC3T is compared to the DCT when compression is performed by adaptive coding. Experimental results show that a significant improvement in visual performance and mean square reconstruction error can be achieved over what is possible with the DCT. The better performance is attributed to the weighting of the DCT coefficients, which is indirectly achieved at reduced computational cost.>