Microsoft Announces new Photography File Format; Microsoft Media Photo
Microsoft has unveiled a new photo format called "Windows Media Photo." This new file format, designed specifically for digital photographs or all continuous-tone still images, surpasses the limitations of existing image formats.
Senior program manager for WMP, Bill Crow, told EE Times that Windows Media Photo will easily enable 25:1 compression ratios for most uses of digital photography, compared to a maximum of about 12:1 for consumer JPEG images before images visibly degrade. If true, this will allow current memory cards and hard drives to store twice as many photographs - at the same quality level.
Windows Media Photo Version 0.9 will ship with Windows Vista and WinFX Runtime Components Beta 2.
Windows Media Photo supports a wide range of features including:
* Multiple color formats for display or print
* Fixed or floating point, high-dynamic-range image encoding
* Lossless or high-quality lossy compression
* Extremely efficient decoding for multiple resolutions and sub-regions
* Minimal overhead for format conversion or transformations during decoding
Windows Media Photo delivers a lightweight, high-performance algorithm with a small memory footprint that enables practical, in-device encoding and decoding.
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