Microsoft Promotes HD Photo Over JPEG

Microsoft is promoting its own image format, HD Photo, in preference to JPEG.

The company began promoting its new image standard in 2006 and hopes it will become the de facto standard for people to use for digital photos.

Perhaps misleadingly, HD does not stand for high definition, but has been called HD to reflect the idea that it will provide the high image quality that comes with HD TV.

Compared with JPEG, HD Photo is said to provide subtler details and richer colours. It also takes up half the storage space as that required by JPEG at the same image quality.

A key element in Microsoft’s strategy to gain widespread acceptance of HD Photo is the inclusion of HD Photo support into Windows Vista, which will be released to consumers on Thursday.

This means that camera manufacturers increasingly will be able to count on HD Photo support when customers upload their images to a computer, and software such as Web browsers will be able to display and save HD Photo images.

Adobe Systems is also helping to support HD Photo. The company is working with Microsoft on a plug-in to enable both Windows and Mac OS X Photoshop users to open and save HD Photo files.

HD Photo is said to provide superior image quality to JPEG in a number of ways:

• For each pixel, HD Photo stores at least 16 bits of data for each colour, compared with 8 bits with JPEG, providing greater variations in tone.

• HD Photo’s compression algorithm produces images that have twice the quality as JPEG at the same file size or the same quality at half the file size.

• HD Photo builds in smaller thumbnail images for quick viewing of files at small sizes, while JPEG thumbnails are generated by a computer’s operating system.

• HD Photo uses Microsoft’s scRGB color space, which provides a wider range of colours than the universal sRGB scheme.