Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Great Discussion of HD Photo

HD-Photo is a new image format coming from Microsoft.  It is intended as a replacement for JPG.  Bill Crow, the program manager for HD Photo, took the time to hang out with the guys from This Week in Media.  The netcast covers a lot of interesting ground including what is wrong with RAW, JPG, and TIFF and why we might want yet another format.  The new format uses floating point values instead of integers which allows for high dynamic range.  That means it can represent parts of an image that are whiter than white or blacker than black.  Unlike some other formats, however, it is highly compressed so the files aren't too large.  I was skeptical that we needed yet another format but after listening to the arguments, I'm convinced this is a good thing.  I'll be watching closely to see how well the industry adopts this format.

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