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My cell phone (SE K700i) can view PNG files very easily and its running 109 Mhz Arm 9. I am sure PNG people are considering such devices/platforms while designing the format.

PNG is not suitable for photo compression. For funny sizes without losing quality, it is Jpeg 2000 but the idiots owning the rights to format are trying to leech ordinary people and ask for $$$ for very simple photos which has nothing to do with 39 mpixel etc. stuff used in advertising agencies. I can't imagine the price they ask for camera bundle since a basic Irfanview plugin to save ordinary (consumer level) jpeg 2000 is $30!

http://www.luratech.com/shop/index.jsp?categoryKey =27

Last time I checked (around october -01) LuraTech had the only actually usable fractal compression product: LuraWave.

While the images shown are impressive (better than classic JPEGs anyway) and the fractal zoom is neat - fractal compression has not (yet) turned out to be very usable. And it seems unlikely to be usable for generic image compression. Building a general purpose fractal image compression/decompression engine has turned out to be quite difficult: The results (of compression) vary a lot and it requires a lot of processing power during compression. Research on fractal compression seems to have slowed down quite a lot since the 90s. Some links.

Wavelets (used by JPEG2000) are much easier to implement and provide more predictable results in speed and compression results. Progressive coding is also a very usable feature (with wavelets it provides the best possible image with the data already transferred).

Sure, it's cool and all, but will its new features compare to Lurawave? You'll need to download a special plugin to use this new jpeg2000 format - same deal with Lurawave? Why wait? :P

it's not simply a matter of getting more pictures on a card. jpeg2000 is a superior compression format in that the picture quality is far better at a given level of compression when compared to jpeg. there are far fewer artifacts introduced at given levels of compression. plus, at roughly half the space of a tiff file, it can store a LOSSLESS compressed file. in addition, it supports metatag data and is scalable, making it very useful in making webpages, archiving, e-mailing - and all with just one file. at the hospital where i am working, we are currently evaluating its usage for our digital pathology archives.

i agree, SOMEONE needs to start pushing jpeg2000. jpeg is simply not enough anymore. there is work being done on jpeg2000. unfortunately, a lot of it seems to be companies trying to proprietize the format.
luratech
lizardtech

A little late in posting, but anybody browsing "old" news might want to know that LuraTech also has wavelet compression.
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Cool. By the way, most current browsers only need the URL once in a A HREF= tag, so the url would be:
http://www.luratech.com /products/download/download15_e.html.

:)

They have a patched version of XV on their page, and I've been playing with it for a bit. Its almost lossless at 25:1 compression on a Q3 screenshot I have.

What I found interesting was the required HTML:
&ltEMBED SRC="eisbaer.lwf" width="384" height="256" limit="29491.2" type="image/x-wavelet">
It supports the obvious width and height, and allows you to set a limit on the number of bytes transferred - that kicks ass. It's obviously loading the image progressively, and you can see this happen (with the plugin) if you enter the URL of an image directly into your browser. On the downside, the browser won't report its ability to handle .lwf images in the HTTP_ACCEPT variable - now you're stuck using Javascript to test for support. Bummer.

Barring whatever patent issues there are, it's still quite a nice implementation.

What I found interesting was the required HTML:
&ltEMBED SRC="eisbaer.lwf" width="384" height="256" limit="29491.2" type="image/x-wavelet">
It supports the obvious width and height, and allows you to set a limit on the number of bytes transferred - that kicks ass. It's obviously loading the image progressively, and you can see this happen (with the plugin) if you enter the URL of an image directly into your browser. On the downside, the browser won't report its ability to handle .lwf images in the HTTP_ACCEPT variable - now you're stuck using Javascript to test for support. Bummer.

Barring whatever patent issues there are, it's still quite a nice implementation.

(http://www.luratech.com/products/productoverview/ pricelist_e.html)

What I can't find is information regarding the patents/etc. regarding the new format - anyone?