Microsoft's HD Photo to Become JPEG Standard?

Mortimer.CA writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft has submitted their HD Photo to the JPEG committee: 'Microsoft's ongoing attempt to establish its own photo format as a JPEG alternative (and potential successor) took another step forward today when the JPEG standards group agreed to consider HD Photo (originally named Windows Media Photo) as a standard. If successful, the new file standard will be known as JPEG XR.' Microsoft has made a 'commitment to make its patents that are required to implement the specification available without charge.' While JPEG 2000 exists, HD Photo has several advantages (not the least of which is a lot less CPU power is needed). Is this a big of an issue as ODF/OOXML?"

Comments

can this be the only solution?

[yagu]

I can't for my life figure out how Microsoft or why Microsoft introduces evil into this format and standard, other than Microsoft's track record. Unfortunately, that is sufficient... I'd vote no on any of their proposals.

The future and potential for photography is huge. There are:

• all the new buyers in the pipeline and hence,
• all the vendors of digital format pictures
• conversion to some archival and historical preserve all existing paper documents
• mapping and navigation software (e.g., Windows Live Earth).
• web graphics in ever higher definition

Microsoft makes their promise to make this free. Somehow, that just rings a tad hollow. Must we continue to be the Charlie Brown to Microsoft's Lucy?

Re:can this be the only solution?

[RegularFry]

They pulled back from a previous licence they were going to release it under, which would have specifically prohibited, for example, a Gimp interface. You can see the old licence details here: http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow/archive/2006/06/30/ 651898.aspx

The current licence is *much* more liberal, and I think Microsoft deserve credit for the move. I still don't trust them, but they did make a move in the right direction in this case.

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[Archangel Michael]

So, what you are saying is that Microsoft is playing the same game as GPL3, except to their advantage, not FOSS or GPL3 or ......

Begun the license wars have.

Not really suitable for raw camera images

[AaronW]

Taking a quick glance at Microsoft's HDPhoto standard it looks like it is not really suitable for capturing raw image data for cameras.

In a digital camera, a pixel is red, green, blue and sometimes additional colors laid out in a pattern that can differ from camera to camera. A pixel is not RGB (unless it's a Fovon sensor), so standard lossless formats like PNG or TIFF won't work. HDPhoto supports N color channels and more than 8 bits per color, but I do not see support for the raw CCD data, which is usually not RGB, but R, G, or B (sometimes with additional colors).

I like to preserve my pictures in RAW format since as time goes by, the algorithms to convert the image to a RGB image suitable for displaying keep improving. Also, when editing my photos, some of the processing is done on the raw data before converting it to RGB. Raw data helps for things like noise filtering, for example, since the noise filtering software can be aware of the camera's CCD properties (Noise Ninja, for example, has profiles for my camera at different ISO settings).

The only problem with current raw photos is that each manufacturer seems to have their own format which is incompatible with other manufacturers, or even incompatible between different cameras. It would be nice if they could standardize on something like OpenRAW.

Now, as much as I dislike Microsoft, I think this could be good for regular photos since the compression is about as good as Jpeg2000 (assuming Microsoft isn't spreading FUD) but with a much faster encoding/decoding speed. This could also be a good format for most people taking pictures (who are happy with JPEG).

-Aaron