According to the company, the new format called Windows Media Photo, will be supported by the much anticipated, but as yet delayed, Windows Vista. However, the format also will be made available for Windows XP.
Bill Crow, program manager for Windows Media Photo, stressed that the driving force behind the new format was picture quality.
"One of the biggest reasons people upgrade their PCs is digital photos," Crow said.
To illustrate that point, Crow showed the crowd an image with a 24:1 compression in three different formats. According to those in attendance, the Windows Media Photo format visibly contained more detail than either the JPEG or JPEG 2000 formats.
However, quality is not the only defining mark of the new format.
Most digital cameras use a 6:1 compression, which means that the Windows format should be able to capture the same results in half the file size, Crow said. He added that the compression technology used in Windows Media Photo is “smart,” so that it is possible to process only part of a large image to display a smaller, thumbnail version.
Microsoft, which has finished the first version of its “porting kit” — software used to build support into non-Windows devices and platforms for the format — expects that the technology should be available to the market rather soon.
In the meantime, the company is still working out the licensing details. But Crow insisted that “licensing should not be a restriction to adoption.”
Whether the market adopts the new format will ultimately be a matter for graphics professionals to decide, according to Steven Wells, a professional photographer in attendance, who called Windows Media Photo “possibly the first viable compression format.”
But as Wells explained, while JPEG is “unusable for professional photographers,” Microsoft will succeed only if software companies like Adobe and Apple that produce applications favored by graphic artists and photographers adopt the new format.
