Last week at PMA, Microsoft formally announced HD Photo. For more information on HD Photo, head over to Bill Crow’s blog. The official press release can be found here. Here’s a summary of the important details:

• Microsoft is announcing HD Photo, a new format for end-to-end digital photography which offers higher image quality, greater preservation of data, and advanced features for today’s digital imaging applications
• The HD Photo Device Porting Kit, used to implement HD Photo in devices and other platforms
• Royalty free licensing
• A free set of HD Photo plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop, developed in conjunction with Adobe
• Microsoft is committed to standardizing the HD Photo technology

HD Photo overview & details:

• A new format for end-to-end digital photography which offers higher image quality, greater preservation of data, and advanced features for today’s digital imaging applications
• Key benefits include:
• Better Image Fidelity: Preserving all the original image content, enabling the highest quality exposure and color adjustments
• State of the art compression: Up to twice the efficiency of JPEG with fewer damaging artifacts, and scalable to lossless
• Powerful Features: Decode only the information needed for any resolution or region, or manipulate the image as compressed data
• Technical Details
• Support for the Widest Range of Pixel Formats
• High Performance, Low Footprint Algorithm
• Advanced Decoding and Transformation Operations
• Better image quality in a file that is up to ½ the size of JPEG
• Lossless and lossy compression with the same algorithm
• Lossy compression is much less destructive than JPEG
• An efficient, portable photo interchange format that preserves the entire dynamic range
• HD Photo Support in Microsoft products:
• Windows Vista in-box support
• Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 support via Windows Imaging Component (WIC), a free download
• Windows Imaging Component (WIC)
• HD Photo Device Porting Kit
• NET Framework 3.0
• XML Paper Specification (XPS) – The XPS format utilizes the HD Photo format to store image data
• Photo Info Power Toy
• Microsoft Expression Family
• HD Photo plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop

- pixblog