New image format

Microsoft is developing a new image standard, which, according to Bill Crow, who presented it at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, will better convey half tones, support an expanded color palette and offer better compression. At his presentation, Crowe showed an image with 24-fold compression, which visually contained more details than JPEG and JPEG 2000 formats with compression of the same level. The working title format is Windows Media Photo. It will be supported by Windows Vista, and also, perhaps, by Windows XP. This format is already built into Vista, but will later be finalized. Probably, such an image format will be widely used in digital cameras, where today 6-fold compression of photos is usually used for an optimal combination of photo weight and quality.