Saturday, January 27th 2007
Microsoft's new picture format gaining momentum
Microsoft, back in May, began promoting it's new "Windows Media Photo" standard, which has been since renamed HD Photo. Microsoft is very clear with it's ambitions: They want to replace JPEG as the primary format for pictures. While some would argue that overtaking JPEG as the most popular picture format is a bit overzealous, Microsoft has two figurative ace-in-the-hole's. The first is that Microsoft will be shipping it with Windows Vista. That means that people who use Windows Vista will be able to see HD Photo, regardless of the photo viewer. This isn't exactly the kind of thing you need to switch people to a picture format. So Adobe systems will patch Photoshop CS3 after it is released to support HD Photo. This will allow users to save their pictures in HD Photo. CNET editors call these methods "pervasive", but they could very well be effective. The picture below shows what the difference is between JPEG and HD Photo when talking about compression. The less color in the picture, the less distortion there is, so ideally a perfect compression would be pitch black.
Source:
CNET
26 Comments on Microsoft's new picture format gaining momentum
I thought I read something about changing jpeg back in 2001/2002?
micr0$ux :p
there have to be a wide range of authoring programs for it, not only cs3
and last the license has to be free, this almost killed gif several years back
Unless its simple/easy to get/access, universally usable (cough wmv? cough), it wont get far..
Quit the flaming.
GLHF MSFT.
they might be able to make the compression more efficient
but as size decreases, quality will ALWAYS go down track in some way shape or formSeems a like a much better albeit more expensive option. But if the technology was developed and advertised to the wider population, it could be cost effective. Especially since people can usually make use of these advantages (faster connections, faster file access) in other ways that just their photo quality.
Although, I feel a bit bad for the JPEG committee... they spent a long time on Jpeg2000 (it's not a bad algorithm mind you, but HD photo is alot better).
The only downside to HD photo is that the quantization factor is specified directly by manufacturer, not by the user whereas in Jpeg2000 (and even Jpeg), you can control the quantization factor.
WAY smaller when taking screenshots of your desktop with very few different colors without artifacts. For ingame-screenshots however (large amount of colors) it is bigger than jpeg.
I know there are lossless operations for jpeg, but I use png for screenshots of my desktop with CPU-Z and shit, as mentioned before, way smaller and no artifacts around text.
I like how it's hdpdemo.jpg ;)