14 DAY TRIAL // 2009 will mark the advent of an evolved JPEG standard developed by Microsoft on top of HD Photo, the digital image format introduced with Windows Vista. The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), a working group of ISO/IEC, announced that JPEG XR, as the standard has been labeled, would be available in 2009. At the 47th WG1 meeting, the JPEG Committee failed to deliver a deadline by which the JPEG XR International Standard (IS) would be published, but indicated that it expected the milestone “later this year.” JPEG XR brings an array of advantages over plain-vanilla JPEG, and Microsoft sees it as becoming ubiquitous following standardization.
“The JPEG XR standard has advanced to Draft International standard balloting. Basically, that means the specification is frozen for implementers; there will not be any more technical changes,” revealed Bill Crow, Seadragon Group Manager, Microsoft Live Labs. “This is really exciting news! JPEG XR is based directly on HD Photo, the new photography file format that Microsoft introduced with the launch of Windows Vista. JPEG XR offers some great benefits for photographers compared to JPEG, or other file formats. It’s great to see this technology is now being embraced as an International standard. I expect this will dramatically accelerate its adoption in cameras and digital photography software and services.”
By moving to the stage of draft international standard, JPEG XR has successfully stepped forward in what are the final phases of standardization, synonymous with the freezing of the specification in order for the format to start being adopted by implementers. The new compression format that comes with high dynamic range support is designed to offer twice the quality of JPEG at the same compression rate. JPEG XR can use 16 bits encoding, superior to the 8 bits of JPEG, at the same time reducing dramatically, down to zero in high quality, the loss of information because of compression artifacts.
“While several folks from Microsoft [have] been actively involved, JPEG XR standardization belongs to the JPEG Committee, not to Microsoft. It is the committee's responsibility to provide any all public information about the overall standards process and status of the JPEG XR working group,” Crow added.