Microsoft made available informations about their Windows Media Photo.

Presented at WinHEC, project manager Bill Crow showed a picture with 24:1 compression that “visibly contained more detail in the Windows Media Photo format than the JPEG and JPEG 2000 formats compressed at the same level”.

The new Media Photo will be supported in Windows Vista and will be made available for XP users.

A smaller file, Crow said, “can also print faster, transfer faster and help conserve battery life on devices. Making a file that is smaller has all kinds of benefits.”

This means that this can be useful for digital camera and mobile phones where you don’t have so much storage space.

Ralf Mueller of Sony Ericsson seemed enthusiastic. He said his company would “look into the new format just as his company looked into supporting Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Video”. However, he added: “Considering our development cycle, I could not see us supporting Windows Media Photo before 2008.”

And here are some basic specifications:

• 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 decode

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