News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

March 8, 2007

photography

A new photo format, courtesy of Microsoft

Posted Mar. 8, ’07, 3:30 PM PT by Thomas Gagnon-van Leeuwen
Category | Photography

hdphoto.jpg

Apparently, Microsoft has decided that JPEG is no good for our era. It’s soooooo 1994. Instead, it hopes the world will start using “HD Photo”, formerly “Windows Media Photo”. OK, so the monopolistic company is arguing that HD Photo’s compression algorithm is superior to JPEG’s, which means your “HD Photos” will look better and have a smaller file size than your JPEG files. But do we really need yet another file format, and from Microsoft, on top of that?

You’re probably aware that the MP3 algorithm for compressing music is not as efficient as AAC. But despite being Apple’s format of choice, AAC has yet to supplant MP3 as the dominant music format. Microsoft’s baby, WMA, hasn’t crushed MP3 either. Neither have FLAC, OGG, or all those other ghetto formats. What does this tell us? However superior HD Photo may be, and even with Microsoft’s push behind it, it’s not likely to take over the imaging world anytime soon. It’ll just be one more annoying format you’ll have to think about in your digital life, just like you currently need to remember how to play and convert the countless video formats. Thank you, Microsoft.


8 Comments

alej744 said:

true that

March 8, 2007 3:46 PM
Larry V said:

At least Ogg Vorbis and AAC are open formats. (Apple's iTunes tracks may be DRM-protected AAC, but AAC itself is not proprietary.) WMA is annoyingly tied down by Microsoft, and this HD Photo will no doubt be kept on a tight leash as well. And I doubt it even has anything to do with High Definition—Microsoft's just using "HD" as a buzzword.

March 8, 2007 4:30 PM
Alex said:

I'm not sure why you lumped FLAC into your list of "ghetto formats". FLAC is an open source format which is very popular in live recording community for trading lossless audio. It may be an audiophile format but FLAC is certainly not ghetto just because Apple won't support it in iTunes.

March 8, 2007 6:45 PM
Thomas GvL Author Profile Page said:

Hey Alex, good point. I just threw in FLAC and Ogg in there as there's not as mainstream as MP3, AAC, or WMA. I didn't mean it in a bad way, it's just that those formats aren't used by most people.

March 8, 2007 6:53 PM
Al said:

If they toss it into the public domain, fine. If not, not so fine.

March 8, 2007 7:54 PM
Kirk said:

AAC is actually proprietary, at least in the same way MP3 is. It is part of the MPEG-4 standard, which means it is not "open", but rather regulated by and industry group.

However, it is not "owned" by Apple, which is something many people believe (probably because of the "A"s in it).

March 9, 2007 12:40 AM
Paul said:

One word: BetaMax.

March 9, 2007 7:57 AM
Horvatic said:

Why? Just because Microsoft doesn't want to follow the mainstream, why do they think everyone should switch to a format they created to be the new standard.
I think jpeg works quite well and I'm sure better than anything Microsoft could ever create. The other factor is Microsoft tends to make things only work for a single platform and leave others out in the cold. Jpeg works with all platforms as it should be.
BAD IDEA PERIOD!

March 9, 2007 9:04 AM

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