30th January 2007 - HD Photo’s silent launch

Microsoft announced its new digital imaging format, Windows Media Photo, last year, renaming it soon after to HD Photo for a number of reasons; it follows the current trend of labelling everything ‘HD’ to suggest the very best quality, it won’t scare Apple users away, and – most importantly – Microsoft isn’t in this to make money, it’s in this to improve user experience and maintain compatibility.

It’s never easy launching a new multimedia format. Even Microsoft’s Windows Media Video, now in its ninth incarnation, hasn’t been able to touch more ‘trusted’ formats such as DivX or the open-source xvid in popularity. Similarly, the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image specification, designed as a replacement for the increasingly tired GIF format, hasn’t managed to replace its predecessor.

The problem here isn’t the technical ability of these new formats – PNG is undoubtedly superior to GIF – but simply public awareness and patent limitations. JPEG’s long-standing success is in its open source architecture, and Microsoft is keen to retain this feeling with HD Photo; whilst it owns the patents, it will allow open source software developers to utilise the format without having to sign any kind of agreement regarding its use.

With a development time spanning over six years, HD Photo’s benefits over JPEG are indisputable; image quality, colour depth and dynamic range is preserved far better, whilst file sizes are reduced by up to fifty percent. The following photo (credit: Microsoft) shows a comparison of formats – the brighter the colours, the more the image deviates from its original:

Microsoft’s secret weapon in the popularity stakes? Silently integrate HD Photo into Windows Vista. As a format, today is HD Photo’s debut, and whilst programs capable of writing the image format have yet to be released, everything that is required to view HD Photo images in Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7 is currently being shipped to millions of PC manufacturers and end users worldwide.

"Clearly, the goal here is to help make it pervasive. If you can use it in Windows, a large percentage of the user base already has access to it," Josh Weisberg, Microsoft's director of digital imaging told news site CNET.

As a keen amateur photographer myself, I’m constantly frustrated at the loss of image quality required to upload a reasonably-sized copy of my latest masterpiece to the web; details are replaced with blocks, colours fade and dark portions disappear completely. With modern digital cameras able to capture huge amounts of detail and with social networking and photo sharing websites such as Flickr, DeviantART and Windows Live Spaces continuing to escalate in popularity, HD Photo is aimed specifically at those wanting to upload their photos for others to view without the loss in image quality associated with JPEG compression.

By embedding the core codec into Windows Vista’s core, Microsoft has done well in preparing for a codec coup d’état  – what remains to be seen is whether the end users will be prepared to take the leap from JPEG, arguably the most prolific document format ever, into the unknown.