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Microsoft Move to be the End of JPEG?

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the just-a-little-bit-better dept.

jcatcw writes "Microsoft Corp. will submit a new photo format to an international standards organization. The format, HD Photo (formerly known as Windows Media Photo), can accommodate lossless and lossy compression. Microsoft claims that adjustments can be made to color balance and exposure settings that won't discard or truncate data that occurs with other bit-map formats."

3 of 447 comments (clear)

  1. Nup, No, Nada. by Whiney+Mac+Fanboy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not going to end jpg - everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW. Everyone satisified with jpg will stick with jpg.

    This is going to enjoy the same sort of limited uptake as jpeg2000 vs jpg, mp4/wma/ogg vs mp3, png vs gif, etc.

    Few other things to note:

    1) The 'HD' doesn't stand for High Definition, it's just there to get the association with HD TV in consumers minds. *rolls eyes*

    2) This technology is patented to the hilt & the licensing terms for the HD Photo Device Porting Kit 1.0 licensing terms specifically exclude copyleft (GPL style) licenses.

    --
    There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
    1. Re:Nup, No, Nada. by dedazo · · Score: 5, Informative

      everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW

      Actually, in the context of digital photography (which I assume is what you're talking about here, though JPEG is of course not limited to that) "everyone" uses TIFF. Just try to do freelance for a news agency and watch how quickly they ask you for TIFF files, which only the high-end cameras can generate.

      I suppose some of the smaller shops or newspapers and whatnot do use RAW, but for Reuters et.al if it's not TIFF you're not getting a paycheck. The same goes for the big stock photography companies and so on.

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      Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
  2. PNG is no replacement for JPG by Animaether · · Score: 5, Informative

    PNG is a replacement for GIF, if anything. JPG files are much smaller than PNG files for typical photographs (though can be smaller for line art and the like), which will always leave JPG as the favorite much like FLAC isn't replacing MP3 anytime soon. The alpha channel in PNG is absolutely a nice perk, but thanks to the dim people at Microsoft never supporting it right until IE7, there wasn't much benefit over using GIF files. (Even though PNG did bi-level transparency just as fine as GIF files - even better, you didn't lose 1 palette entry - but that as an aside.)

    If you want a JPG replacement - a la OGG Vorbis over MP3 - try JPEG2000 or the lurawave stuff based on wavelets.