Bill Gates is one persistent little man. Microsoft continues to fight for their own photo format as an alternative to the JPEG. Gates’ goal went a step further today as the JPEG standards group announced that they would consider the Microsoft HD Photo to be a standard format.
Microsoft has thrown lots of money and man power into their fight to make HD Photo a standard, specifically focusing on the digital photography niche. HD Photo features include fixed or floating point high dynamic range, wide gamut image encoding, better compression compared to JPEG, lossless compression, the ability to store 16 or 32 bits of data per color, and support for CMYK, RGB, monochrome, and embedded ICC color profiles. — Andrew Dobrow