Windows Media Photo ~OR~ JPEG ?

Microsoft has come up with it's own new still image format called Windows Media Photo. The file extension for a Windows Media Photo file is WDP.


According to their Windows Media Photo specification document Windows Media Photo offers image quality comparable to JPEG-2000 with computational and memory performance more closely comparable to JPEG. Windows Media Photo delivers a lossy compressed image of better perceptive quality than JPEG at less than half the file size. The same compression algorithm can also deliver mathematically lossless compressed images that are typically 2.5 times smaller than the original uncompressed data.
The use of new algorithms are also claimed to reduce the visibility of 'objectionable spatial artifacts' (those mosquito JPEG artifacts). Windows Media Photo supports a wide range of image formats including both fixed and floating point numerical representations , various color spaces, metadata and even transparency. This new format will be supported in Windows Vista when it arrives and will be made available for Windows XP, there has been no word yet of support for the format in any hardware devices.

For more information on Windows Media Photo, click here or else on the windows image above.

(Excerpts drawn from: microsoft.com)