Microsoft is announcing a new image format called HD Photo. Supposedly better than jpeg in quality and smaller in size. It remains to be seen if this new format will compete with existing formats. Will MS make it windows only? They love to make things propriatary and abuse their monopoly power.

Any thoughts?

The only reason it will/may catch on is because their built in photo viewer supports it. A better JPEG alternative has been around for a while now, jpeg2000. You can save lossless or lossy, expanded metadata expanded and noted via different file extions, jpx, jp2, to handle color space and enhanced metadata. I'm still a big fan of 24-bit png for archiving, or I use the GIMP to make 100% quality jpegs with 50 restart markers. The resulting files are about half the size of my raws and very very high quality.
The one thing holding both of them back.... neither format is supported by a webbrowser.

But hey, I'm always up for a new image format

bump

any more thoughts?

Oh, that's JUST what the world needs. A company that's ticked off because it just dumped it's world monopoy in computer operating systems now seeks to re-gain it by monopolizing the world's image format?

No thanks.

And I love the naming too. As soon as the world started hearing "High Definition", the catch phrase is now slapped on EVERYTHING. The other day I saw an ad for new "High Definition contact lenses". Are you serious??

I suppose a High Definintion image is much better quality than the old obsolete Low Definintion Jpeg. And I'm sure if they had their way, every consumer gumball machine snappy cam will now sport "HD capabillity!!"

Can you see the long-range planning involved in this scam? Will you eventually need to call Microsoft for "Product Actication" on a pay per view sort of scheme?

We also discussed this in this thread:

http://www.opensourcephoto.net/forum/index...mp;hl=co-opting

My take: Keep standards out of the hands of large companies that control a large portion of our computing (M$, Apple, and maybe even Sun).

By the way, Kevin, are you saying I got ripped off on my new High Definition Toilet with Built-in bidet?

microsoft can suck my... okay nevermind.

this topic (and every single other one about microsoft) makes me laugh. they are out of their freaking minds, and its true... they "try" a lot of things, but in my opinion, they're flushing themselves down that new HD toilet of yours faster than you can say "windows vista"