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I don’t know about you but I am rather content using JPEGs as my standard image file format, with the inclusion of the bitmap or Tiff every once in a while. Well as anyone could guess, Microsoft is not. Today the company unveiled a new formatted entitled Windows Media Photo. The new format will be supported in Vista and also be made available for Windows XP.

“One of the biggest reasons people upgrade their PCs is digital photos,” Crow said, noting that Microsoft has been in contact with printer makers, digital camera companies and other unnamed industry partners while working on Windows Media Photo.

The new format performs a 24:1 compression as compared to the current 6:1 compression used by JPEGs. Not only does compression save storage space, important for cell phones and digital cameras, a smaller file can also print faster, transfer faster, and conserve battery life on devices. Finally, the compression technology is “smart.” It is possible to process only part of a huge, picture file to show a smaller version and it allows such things as rotating the image without the need to decode it and subsequently encode it again.

Read [News.com]