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Microsoft Move to be the End of JPEG?
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."
If you're not discarding data when you're adjusting color-balance and other settings, you're by definition not compressing as much as you possibly can.
For example, if I desaturate a photo I'm throwing away tons of color information. If that color information is still being written to the file, the file isn't as small as it could be.
Aside from that, PNG should have dethroned JPG long ago for the very simple reason that it contains an alpha channel -- but I still see plenty of JPG's.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I thought PNG was supposed to replace GIF because it can do transparencies and because GIF used to be encumbered by patent issues while PNG was open.
Doesn't do anything tiff can't
If this is the same as the last time around, they've just taken tiff, duplicated a bunch of the baseline tags for no good reason (other than to make it incompatible), added their own codec (which they could have done to tiff very easily), removed a bunch of useful stuff from tiff, and called it their own image format. It's a real hack job.
It's just MS being the MS we've come to know and love so well -- making their own binary formats in the hopes of extending their monopoly.
Ian Ameline
No. Next!
Rationale? We already have JPEG for lossy and PNG for lossless and now that GIF is off-patent we have that too. All of these have un-encumbered implementations. Having lossless and lossy in one format doesn't really offer much of an advantage. Unless this new image format gives me time-traveling X-ray vision into whatever the picture is, why should I care? Extra compression is nice, and it might be worthwhile if you were archiving terabytes of image data. Most web sites are not, so even if it has better compression it's still not worth the hassle of switching. Bandwidth and storage are just not that expensive. In other words, it would have to totally blow away the existing formats by some performance metric. I have a hard time believing the ammount of effort to switch things over could be justified. What could possibly be that much better about any new image format? Anyone remember JPEG 2000? The wavelet compression was really interesting, but it was proprietary, somebody was trying to make money off it, and so nobody cared. It's tough to enter a market where the price is already set at ZERO. The existing product in such a market has to be inferior enough so that people are willing to pony up the extra bills. An example of where this has happened in the recent past is the compiler market. People were willing to pay extra for the Intel compiler even though GCC is free, because the Intel compiler generated faster code. It's been a while since I've looked into that, so I don't know if that's still the situation. Even with the performance difference, many people still just stuck with GCC rather than pay more. This is not MS-bashing. It's just basic economics.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I don't see how this would replace jpg in any remote way whatsoever. Where are most images stored and viewed? On the internet and a browser. I need a small, high quality image. I don't need to go visit cnn.com and adjust the tint, hue and color levels of the "breaking news" graphic on their site.
Not to mention, I am highly skeptical of any attempt Microsoft claims to be making toward "standardization".
"Doesn't matter, the point is that anyone who's dissatisifed with JPG has allready found an alternative."
That's not what you said. You said "Not going to end jpg - everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW." RAW is a camera format, not an output format. No one uses RAW as a replacement for jpeg except during image acquisition.
As for everyone already using alternatives, that may be so but that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement. This may not be the answer but it's naive to think that the image formats we have now are all there will ever be.
Is space more valuable than time? CPUs are becoming faster, but storage is becoming cheaper too...
Don't forget that it's no longer just space/time tradeoffs. There's also the network bandwidth tradeoff. And network bandwidth is not on the same kind of curve as CPU's or storage at least for WANs.
And look what happened there. WMV was supposed to be the death of MPEG-4/Divx. And the Zune was supposed to be the death of the iPod. They try so hard and always come up short.
I'm sure the format has a boatload of patents associated with it that would preclude it from being used in any open source projects.
Heck, if JPEG2000 and MP3Pro can't catch on, what makes them think this will?
Well.... the whole point of RAW isn't to share files. It's to preserve sensor data EXACTLY as it is received so that it can be processed on a computer, and not on the camera itself. This has numerous advantages, as it is possible to make substantial adjustments to the image without severely compromising image quality.
Because there are various algorithms to do this, it would be downright foolish to send a RAW file to an agency. However, because there's no loss, converting the RAW to a TIFF is trivial, and there's no real reason not to shoot raw unless you don't plan on doing any post-processing. Also, RAW files tend to be smaller than TIFFs when shot on the camera.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
If it's widely supported by browsers, OS's, PDA's, phones, playstations, web tv, photo cd's & dvd's, email apps, [word, excel, powerpoint (& the superior rivals)], printers, print shops, memory card printers & copiers, cameras, ipods & design apps I think it might have a chance.
Since Microsoft won't even be supporting it fully in their own apps (no evidence, but its just obvious right) I don't think it has much chance.
* Game Over * High Score: 264,846,927 -- Your Score: 14
You are obviously not a linguist. Linguists study just this sort of thing. It turns out that just these sort of 'widespread practices' go on all the time in languages. They do not destroy languages. They create new ones, and extend old ones.
Your fear of 'a cesspool of illiteracy' is completely unfounded. It will not happen. You can stop the grammar nazi posts now.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
You can have mine. I have some ketchup for you if you'd like. Microsoft has one of the best graphics research groups in the world, probably the best. The gold standard for publishing graphics research is Siggraph, and last year they had authors on 18 of the 98 papers. In contrast, MIT faculty had 5, Intel had 2, and AMD/nVidia/ATI had 0. In the world of graphics, MS Research is a powerhouse. You can see the official list of papers here: http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/main.php?f=conferenc e&p=papers
or the entire list on one page:
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/sig2006.html
I certainly don't love MS either, but they have a lot of exceptional graphics people as MS Research.
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.
It's trivial to do that: instead of changing the bits, you add a list of transformations to the image header. Trouble is: when such a format comes from Microsoft, they will have numerous patents on it and Microsoft will use those aggressively to maintain their monopoly. It doesn't matter that it's obvious how to do this. It doesn't matter that they weren't the first to invent it.
The world does need a better alternative to JPEG, but it must not come from Microsoft. The FOSS world should instead repeat what happened with PNG and Ogg: create an open, patent-unencumbered format.