JPEG Photo Format on Its Way Out? – PCWorld.com: Microsoft Corp. will soon submit a new photo format to an international standards organization that it says offers higher quality images with better compression.
The format, HD Photo, is taking aim at the JPEG format, a 15-year old technology still widely used in digital cameras and image applications.
Although JPEG is aging, it has been modified to help keep it up to date.
Adobe Systems Inc. and Microsoft will release a plug-ins for CS3 and CS2 versions of its widely used Photoshop program for Vista, XP and Apple Inc.’s OS X. Also, Microsoft also has built a HD Photo Device Porting Kit so hardware manufacturers can support it.
I trust *nothing* from Micro$oft! Any new formats or standards must come from the open source community if they are to have any wide-spread use. Don’t trust a proprietary format from a comercial company!
Haha, just use bitmap if you want high quality lossless pictures.
#18 that the existance of a license is not, per se, a limitation of free use of a piece of code or, in this case, an imaging format/standard.
The fact that it is MS creating the license… that’s another story, but since I have not read the EULA, I cannot comment.
#21 I don’t fully trust MS. On the same token, I have some bad feelings about open source.
MS will run into the same problem that alternative sound formats have experienced – the established user base. Everyone uses JPG. If MS can get the camera makers to go along with this, the new format may have a chance of overtaking the older standard, so long as it doesn’t inconvenience Joe User on vacation at the beach.
SN, you’re right about Microsoft’s MO, but if they later change the terms in ways that interfere with people’s ability to use it, I believe they could wind up with serious problems, like Sony with its idiot root kits. Anyway, as Greg Allen pointed out, most people create their own images so it doesn’t seem very likely to become the same kind of issue as the way MS panders to the entertainment mafia.