Windows Media Photo

What do you think? Is this really needed? Here are some opinions, then I’ll share my own:

“While the half the size of a JPG is interesting, it’s largely irrelevant in my opinion,” blogged Thomas Hawk, a San Francisco-based digital media enthusiast and author of the “Digital Media” blog. “Flash memory and hard drive storage cost being what it is these days storing JPG images is not inconvenient. But better quality is something and this could be meaningful.”

Microsoft has unveiled its new image compression format, called Windows Media Photo, which will be natively supported in Windows Vista and upgrades to XP. WM Photo features 24:1 compression while retaining far more detail than JPEG or JPEG 2000 formats. Microsoft is shooting to have higher quality than typical digital cameras while at a 12:1 level (most cameras use 6:1, so that’s a very good thing).

The format also has advanced features, including processing to only show part of the image to shrink it, and rotating without re-encoding the image.

Although I partly agree with Thomas Hawk and think overcoming JPEG’s wide acceptance and use is going to be an uphill battle, I don’t think ignoring the fact of smaller file sizes is helpful. Sure storage is getting cheaper and bandwidth is getting wider, but should we continue to glutton ourselves on what’s available instead of trying to become leaner and sharper? I think not. There needs to be a combo of both.

I like what Nathan Weinberg has to say as well, but a crucial factor will be whether or not the new format will be supported in browsers. That’s my biggest concern, what I don’t want to have to deal with is having a separate file format for online photos and those stored on my local drives, because if you’re a web designer like myself, then you’ve got two photos of the same thing, and that’s just annoying!

Source: Microsoft Pushes Its Own Alternative to JPEG
Source: Microsoft Taking on JPEG; About Damn Time!