Most Popular
| Top Stories | Commented | Featured |
ATI Radeon HD 5570 Review featured
AMD's six-core Thuban to have feature like Turbo Boost?
Google to launch Twitter-like service for Gmail
Intel unveils Itanium 9300 series enterprise processors
Intel Core i5-based MacBook Pros coming soon?
Netflix to roll out 1080p streaming later this year
China closes major hacker ring, arrests three members
Sharp and Samsung end LCD patent suits with cross-licensing agreement
TS Community
| User Gallery | Recent Discussion |
 3 Screens of Techspot- WakeMO by WakeMO |  New Elite Gaming/Media Center PC by JimShady23 |
 Best of 2008 com port by nicholas_t |  OUTER LIMITS by earthlostangel |
TechSpot RSSIndustry News
Microsoft launches JPEG rival
The JPEG image format has been key to the effectiveness of the Web - the cleverly compressed image format made it possible for visually stunning web pages to be developed and browsed by users back in a time where download speeds were like treacle. But now, Microsoft wants to challenge the format's dominance.
At the recent Windows Hardware Engineering conference, Microsoft has unveiled a rival image format - Windows Media Photo file format. Seemingly, this new format has compression technology can offer better images at half the size of a JPEG file, and offers fixed or floating point high dynamic range image encoding. Lossless or high quality lossy compression is also available, and the overhead for format conversion or transformations during decode is minimal. It will help users to save on storage space, and contains features that allow only parts of the image to be compressed if desired.
But is this not going far enough? Can this new format really take on, and overtake JPEG, which is such an established standard? If the compression ratio were, say, ten times better than JPEG, then maybe it might be in with a chance. But is two times the compression really enough for people to sit up and take notice?
At the recent Windows Hardware Engineering conference, Microsoft has unveiled a rival image format - Windows Media Photo file format. Seemingly, this new format has compression technology can offer better images at half the size of a JPEG file, and offers fixed or floating point high dynamic range image encoding. Lossless or high quality lossy compression is also available, and the overhead for format conversion or transformations during decode is minimal. It will help users to save on storage space, and contains features that allow only parts of the image to be compressed if desired.
But is this not going far enough? Can this new format really take on, and overtake JPEG, which is such an established standard? If the compression ratio were, say, ten times better than JPEG, then maybe it might be in with a chance. But is two times the compression really enough for people to sit up and take notice?
Related Stories
User Comments (2)
Post a comment| canadian on May 25, 2006 10:08 PM | If other programs will be able to use this new format, like
paint, Firefox, and more, then it might start being used.
But only if 3rd party companies support it.
|
| ThomasNews on May 26, 2006 6:59 AM | Does this offer anything over PNG? I mean, apart from the
fact that IE offers incomplete PNG support. Then, I guess
they mightn't necessarily need to worry about that; digital
cameras would seem to be a more likely route for getting
support for it. [Edited by ThomasNews on 2006-05-26 07:06:56]
|
