Windows Media Photo: Microsoft’s JPEG Killer?
Among the interesting sessions I've been to at WinHEC was one on something I'd never heard of before: Microsoft's Windows Media Photo file format. It is, basically, a counterpart to Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Video for photo images. And Microsoft says it's dramatically better than JPEG, the current photo lingua franca, from a technical standpoint.
Judging from the demo this morning, that could be true. Windows Media Photo is designed to preserve more of a photo's information (such as dynamic range) than JPEG does, and to provide better-looking photos at a higher compression level. (Microsoft says that it'll still produce a reasonable-looking photo even at 25X compression.)
WMP also has various other technical advantages, such as allowing devices and software that support it to render a region of the image, or a lower-res version, without having to wrestle with the entire photo at full resolution. And it provides for both lossy and lossless compression with one algorithm.
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