Microsoft Wants To Overwrite Your Wedding Pictures
Say what you want about Microsoft, but they sure pick out big game to hunt. Now they've announced they want to kill the JPEG format, using their HD Photo format. That's like replacing running water at this point.
Microsoft claims that "this new, next-generation digital image format offers the best solution for digital image editing and storage and unlocks the potential for digital photography on devices, applications and services." The company promises a compression with up to twice the efficiency of JPEG, with fewer damaging artifacts, resulting in higher-quality images that are one-half the file size. In addition, HD Photo is described to offer "increased image fidelity, preserving the entire original image content and enabling higher-quality exposure and color adjustments in the image." HD Photo files can be saved with a variety of options, both lossless and lossy image compression, and - according to Microsoft - can retain the full dynamic range and color gamut data from a camera's sensor. Changes made to a picture do not discard or truncate data and allow users to undo those changes at a later time, Microsoft claims.
