Microsoft shows off JPEG rival | Tech News on ZDNet:
The software maker detailed the new image format Wednesday at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference here. Windows Media Photo will be supported in Windows Vista and also be made available for Windows XP, Bill Crow, program manager for Windows Media Photo said in a presentation.
Do we really need another graphic image format? JPEG, JP2000, PNG and TIFF are more than enough for us. Let us say that Microsoft’s file format is indeed better – there are still several questions that need to be answered and the most important one is licensing. Microsoft is not known to give away their technology for free so I doubt if this technology will be given away for free. Heck, they even tried exploiting the FAT32 patent. Shesh!
Next question is – how fast can you encode and decode the image? What is the use of an ultra small file format if it takes you a minute to encode/compress an image and another 30 seconds to decode it? Or maybe it requires a quad processor device to achieve instantaneous encoding/decoding. hehehe…
With digital cameras now supporting CCD/CMOS RAW image file formats and with storage getting cheaper and faster, I think RAW and JPEG are here to stay. Heck, you can use fractal image compression techniques and achieve far better image quality but again, the question of processing power requirement should be addressed.
Anyway, until the first issue gets answered, I don’t think Microsoft can successfully push this technology for rapid adoption. 
Technorati Tags: Windows Media Photo
