Microsoft Announces HD Photo, a New Imaging File Format with Advanced Features

This isn't really news you would associate with MissingRemote, but I thought it was interesting enough to post. MS has announced they are coming out with a new format called HD Photo. It is supposed to have twice the efficiency of JPEG with fewer compression related artificats. This, of course, will result in a file size half of JPEG. With consumer digicams getting into the 10 MP range, this will be a nice step forward for archiving photos.

From the article:

With HD Photo, we’re
taking a new approach to creating and editing photos that simply isn’t
available to photographers with today’s formats,” said Amir Majidimehr,
corporate vice president of the Consumer Media Technology Group at
Microsoft. “HD Photo fully preserves the original image fidelity with
high dynamic range while still allowing for significant improvement in
compression size.”

In addition, HD Photo offers both lossless and lossy image compression,
and can retain the full dynamic range and color gamut data from a
camera’s sensor. Also, because making adjustments to common color
balance and exposure settings won’t discard or truncate data as other
common bitmap formats typically do, it’s easier to “undo” those changes
at a later time. As a result, significantly smaller files can be
created while still retaining optimum picture quality.