Microsoft Announces New Image Format to Rival JPEG
 

SEATLE ? Software giant Microsoft announced a new image format to rival JPEG ? the de facto adult industry standard for pictures ? at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference.

According to the company, the new format called Windows Media Photo, will be supported by the much anticipated, but as yet delayed, Windows Vista. However, the format also will be made available for Windows XP.

Bill Crow, program manager for Windows Media Photo, stressed that the driving force behind the new format was picture quality.

"One of the biggest reasons people upgrade their PCs is digital photos," Crow said.

To illustrate that point, Crow showed the crowd an image with a 24:1 compression in three different formats. According to those in attendance, the Windows Media Photo format visibly contained more detail than either the JPEG or JPEG 2000 formats.

However, quality is not the only defining mark of the new format.

Most digital cameras use a 6:1 compression, which means that the Windows format should be able to capture the same results in half the file size, Crow said. He added that the compression technology used in Windows Media Photo is ?smart,? so that it is possible to process only part of a large image to display a smaller, thumbnail version.

Microsoft, which has finished the first version of its ?porting kit? ? software used to build support into non-Windows devices and platforms for the format ? expects that the technology should be available to the market rather soon.

In the meantime, the company is still working out the licensing details. But Crow insisted that ?licensing should not be a restriction to adoption.?

Whether the market adopts the new format will ultimately be a matter for graphics professionals to decide, according to Steven Wells, a professional photographer in attendance, who called Windows Media Photo ?possibly the first viable compression format.?

But as Wells explained, while JPEG is ?unusable for professional photographers,? Microsoft will succeed only if software companies like Adobe and Apple that produce applications favored by graphic artists and photographers adopt the new format.

Xbiz.com

Awesome! Betamax for image files.

I wonder how many security exploits this is gonna have.

Fuck that. JPG is too ingrained and standardized.

I heard that Microsoft was working on a better mousetrap too.

:thumbsup

if it wasn't created by microsoft I would be all for it, we can't stay in the stone age forever, technology moves on, we can't be using jpeg/mpeg/mp3/etc forever...

they'll patent it and fuck everyone later.

Hopefully the licensing details won't hold any surprises. I like the better compression.

Dream on....

That's one good news.. filesize will drop, so that's less BW for us ;)

Would be nice if it was able to do animation so we could dump gifs

i heard microsoft was working on a better OS.... lmao

Good point. That would be an awesome feature.

Who gives a fuck really!

Just what the world needs...another image format. This one from Microcrap, no less.

And of course - anything that's compatible with it will be (drumroll) - proprietary to Mr. Gates.

I'll stay with .jpg thanks.