A new Microsoft  -backed photo format might someday make the popular JPEG format obsolete. The company announced Thursday that its HD Photo format -- formerly known as Windows Media Photo -- would soon be submitted to international standards organizations for approval.
In an announcement made at the Photo Marketing Association trade show in Las Vegas, Microsoft claimed the new format causes less quality loss after compression and provides better images with file sizes that are half that of comparable JPEG images.
The 15-year-old JPEG format is commonly used for photos on Web pages and other applications. On the Web, file size is of course an important consideration. While broadband access is increasing in the U.S. and elsewhere, many consumers still use dial-up access and have to sit through long loadings of Web pages.
HD Photo can use both "lossy" compression, where some picture information is sacrificed for smaller file size, and "lossless," where quality is kept higher at the price of a larger file.
'Vintage Microsoft'
"This is vintage Microsoft," said Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio, noting that big companies often push for adoption of their version of a new standard. "The biggest fear that business and other users will have, even if it is a better technical solution, is that it will be a closed and proprietary format."
If you're Microsoft, she added, "the smart thing would be to make it an open standard or make it free." She said she did not expect the format to have much impact immediately.
The Redmond, Washington-based company reportedly is seeking a business model that relies primarily on selling HD Photo-compatible software, but terms for licensing use of the format were not released in today's announcement.
Photoshop Support
Under the name Windows Media Photo, HD Photo support is built into Vista, Microsoft's new operating system . Future releases of Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer will also support the format.
Adobe Systems will support HD Photo plug-ins for Photoshop in its CS3 and CS2 versions. As the premiere photo and graphics software, Photoshop's support is clearly critical to wide acceptance. The plug-ins will allow HD Photo formats to be read and written within Photoshop, and will be available for Windows Vista, XP, and Mac OS X. The plug-ins are now available in beta at the Microsoft Download Center, and they will be released in final versions within 60 days.
An HD Photo Device Porting Kit is also available from Microsoft. It allows manufacturers to add support for the format.
Several smaller companies have already announced HD Photo support. Taiwan-based Sunplus Technology, Novatek, and Ability Enterprise -- all involved with either image-processing sensors or other optical products -- plan to back it.
|
