Insiders have long speculated about Microsoft’s new HDPhoto. It has been announced and now the speculation begins as to whether it will replace the JPEG format.
From Microsoft:
HD Photo is a new file format for continuous-tone still images that surpasses the limitations of existing image formats. HD Photo supports a wide range of features including:
- Multiple color formats for display or print
- Fixed or floating point high-dynamic-range image encoding
- Lossless or high-quality lossy compression
- Efficient decoding for multiple resolutions and subregions
- Minimal overhead for format conversion or transformations during decode
HD Photo delivers a lightweight, high performance algorithm with a small memory footprint that enables practical, in-device encoding and decoding.
It delivers compression quality comparable with JPEG-2000 and more than twice the quality of JPEG.HD Photo is the new name for Windows Media Photo. Both names refer to the exact same file format. The Windows Media Photo name is still used to describe the implementation of HD Photo in existing Windows products.
We will have to wait and see how the photography community reacts.
The speculation is that HDPhoto has the same compression quality as JPEG2000, but wasn’t that product a failure?
I wonder what the public would rather – consistency or competition?
It will be interesting to see how this develops. I’ll talk more about it on the show.
Gavin