Microsoft: Make our HD Photo format a standard

If you love something, set it free.

Such is the reasoning behind a step Microsoft plans to announce Thursday: it will submit its HD Photo image format to a standards body. Making HD Photos a neutral industry standard, not just a Microsoft technology, is a significant step in the company's ambitious plan to establish a higher-quality replacement for today's ubiquitous JPEG standard.

"Microsoft...intends to standardize the technology and will be submitting HD Photo to an appropriate standards organization shortly," the company said in a statement. The company plans to announce the move Thursday at the Photo Marketing Association trade show in Las Vegas.

The standardization move makes sense, given Microsoft's ambitions, said InfoTrends analyst Ed Lee. "If Microsoft is looking for wider adoption of the format, it needs to be divorced from Microsoft itself," he said. "They're going to have to loosen the strings on it."

The company prizes its intellectual property as the foundation for its business. So what might Microsoft get by giving away technology? In short, an influential place at the heart of consumers' digital photography world.

"The companies that can help consumers manage and access photos ultimately will have a significant say in how those images are monetized in the future," for example, by connecting to services for photo sharing, editing and printing, Lee said. "The more Microsoft can be ingrained into the workflow process, the better their future is going to look."

Microsoft isn't commenting on its motives, but the standardization move follows earlier lowering of barriers.

In November, it liberalized the licensing policy--dropping fees, for example. At that time, it adopted the neutral HD Photo name instead of the Microsoft-centric Windows Media Photo, though Windows Vista uses the older name. And the company has said HD Photo technology is covered by the Open Specification Promise, an agreement under which Microsoft pledges not to assert its patent rights, which makes it more palatable to potential rivals--in particular open-source programmers.

Standards bodies can be a mixed blessing for technology companies. On the one hand, they can build broad industry support for a technology, enabling different companies' products to work better together. Ideally, standards rise above a particular company's agenda to reflect the needs and experience of several companies.

On the other hand, the consortia that create and approve standards are notoriously sluggish, especially when compared to the fast-moving computer industry, as Josh Weisberg, Microsoft's director of digital imaging evangelism, observed in January. And standards efforts aren't immune to competitive jockeying: Microsoft has faced obstacles trying to standardize its OOXML office document file formats.

Microsoft has put years of research into HD Photo and knows it has years more work to create a JPEG alternative, much less replacement. The company knows it has to woo partners from every corner of the industry, including camera makers and those who build photo printing kiosks.

"We know for it to be successful there has to be whole ecosystem," Rico Malvar, a Microsoft Research director who helped develop the format, said Tuesday at a meeting with reporters in Seattle.

But Microsoft is in a unique position to be able to create that ecosystem, Malvar argued. "When we see a need we go ahead and do it. We understand what it takes to work on a technology and make it into a real product," he said.

Standards can be easier to embrace. "In general, the spirit of the standardization effort is very helpful and useful," said Suresh Venkatraman, director of digital camera work at Micron, which manufactures image sensors and processing chips.

And there's a place for a JPEG successor, he added, though stopping short of endorsing HD Photo.

"From the sensor viewpoint, we're looking at how to get a larger color range. Translating that into a file format is something where there's room for improvement," Venkatraman said.

A broader color gamut is indeed one of the advantages Microsoft touts for HD Photo. ("HD" doesn't actually stand for anything, but the company hopes it will connote the "high definition" advantages of HDTV.) Among other HD Photo features:

• It can store 16 or 32 bits of data for each color, compared with JPEG's 8 bits, making it easier to discern shadow details or the subtle tonal variations of snow in sunlight.

• It compresses data twice as efficiently as JPEG, with either twice the quality at a given file size or half the file size at a given quality.

• It's designed to work well in camera image-processing chips, and to reduce memory requirements, it encodes images chunk by chunk without having to store the complete image at one time.

Microsoft has built support for the newer format into Windows Vista and has won an ally in influential graphics company Adobe Systems. At the same time, though, many of the photographers most likely to appreciate HD Photo's advantages already are shooting using "raw" data taken directly from the camera image sensors. Adobe is trying to replace myriad raw formats with its own Digital Negative specification, though it hasn't said whether it will seek to formally standardize that technology.

Overall, Microsoft's HD Photo journey has just begun.

"You're still probably talking at least a couple years before you get some form of critical mass," Lee said, and displacing JPEG is another challenge beyond that. "They're just at the very, very beginning."

CNET News.com's Ina Fried contributed to this report.

[xcgeek]

continual MS Branding issues

Just this week CNet posted about mis-branding of HD: http://news.com.com/2300-1024_3-6163965.html?tag=ne.gall.latest.index
And now MS has changed the name of this format to HD Photo. Firstly MS messed up the .NET brand by putting it on everything it owned till nobody knew what it meant, and now it's in the process of doing the same with the Live moniker. MS needs some help in the marketing department. Hopefully it just becomes known as it's file extension of HDP - but even that doesn't exactly roll of the tongue.

[Bryan777]

Graphics format from MS?

70% of media arts professionals use Macs. They will not adopt
any MS format. Even professionals that use Windows and have to
deal with pre-press firms that use Macs. Adobe, not MS, is the
graphics standard-bearer. The only thing MS will do is further
muddy the waters for all the amateurs, hobbyists and wanabees
the use products like Publisher, Front Page, and even Word, as
graphics tools. PSD (photoshop), JPG-RAW, TIFF and PNG are
robust formats and the state of the art.

MS is struggling to be relevant in the graphics space. They
should stick with being a commodity in the OS space. Leave the
expertise to Apple, Adobe and other companies that are
dedicated to excellence, not just trying to control standards.

[scdecade]

MS's standard offer

The first vial of crack is always free.

[scdecade]

MS's standard offer

The first vial of crack is always free.

[Karl Viklund]

No

We don't need a new "standard" from MS. We already got PNG which is a very good replacement for JPEG. This is totally stupid. HD Photo will just be another Microsoft technology that only Microsoft will end using. WMA, HP Photo and Office Open XML. Let them all just die.

[Thomas, David]

A Cold Day in Hades Before that's Accepted

This is a joke, a thinly vield disguise of a move for control in the
graphics space.

First, I would like a show of hands, of anyone who asked
Microsoft for such a "standard". .... thought so, no one.

This is merely a push to gain foot-hold in a market they truly
have no business in. I can only cringe.

What makes a standard? Certainly not someone, or some
company that says "Hey, Look what I've got ... its a new
standard!". What a farce.

Standards come into being because
A) Everyone, or a majority of people are using a common
approach. At some point a group of different parties come
together, and provide guidelines, suggestions, and sometimes
code to move the standard forward. When a standard becomes
obsolete, hopefully the group will address this, simply because it
is in everyones common interest.
B) There is a common need, and parties from different groups
come together to find a common approach to solve a problem.

Microsoft is completely self serving in this. The author of this
article should be blasted for suggesting otherwise. After all we
go through with this corporation, you would think that no one
can be fooled anymore. I suspect no one was fooled in this
case, but merely an approach to sell the idea to us. Like we'd
really bite. To do so, would only result in being bitten. Well, I
have something they can bite on.

[System Tyrant]

They should...

make it a standard. It is a good graphics format.

What they need to do though is standardize it and give up all legal claims to it.

[freemarket--2008]

Whatever happened to Flashpix?

It's been out for ages and doesn't seem to have caught on. I know it used alot of storage space, but it only used a small amount of bandwith when displaying an image. I had an image of a tiger from a Kodak CD where you could zoom in and see the taste buds on his tongue.

[befuddledms]

do you really trust Steve Ballmer?

Why would anyone trust a company who wants to charge $4000 for a patch to fix the Daylight Savings issue for Windows 2000? A patch that they have already written. I don't trust them as far as I could fling a Vista CD into the trashcan.

[frankwick]

YES! YES! YES!

It is a great format but people will not accept it since it is from MS. If it is adopted as a standard then we may see proliferation.

Think of this standard as a format nestled between RAW and JPG. JPG loses so much detail at higher compression and RAW files are way too big and slow. JPG2000 attempted to find the happy medium but never had support or the push to help adopt it.

This is only good news for anyone who struggles with jpg files like I do on a daily basis.

[NWLB]

Beware of Microsoft Baring Gifts.

N/M.

[Razzl]

the faltering monopolist

Kind of amazing the thought process going on here. Since Microsoft retains massive monopolistic control over the world's computer desktop software space, why would they think that their in-house standard won't succeed? Do they really think that making their proprietary format open will bring business their way? The open-source community will make such short work of incorporating this into their softwares that consumers won't even have a chance to worry about deciding between Microsoft or something else for processing it. Microsoft is losing its touch in the marketplace on every front...

[t8]

Beware of Microsoft

The devil may be in the details.
You need a lawyer to figure out if it is OK to use.

An open source format would be safer to use.

[t8]

It feels wrong

I have a gut feeling that if MS managed to make this file a standard that the control that MS would assert would be damaging to everyone.

Just a gut feeling? Not really. History is the best teacher and MS history is full of manipulation, greed, control, and abuse.

[NoVista]

Coincidence?

At this point in time, when MS is trying to convince the world that Linux encroaches on their intellectual property, they are generously going to supply an open standard to the world? Hmmmm ...

Re Flashpix, heard of it, never used it. Sounds like maybe used a fractal approach.

I shoot mostly JPG with my Fuji S7000 at highest quality. If there's a subject that really requires the extra detail, RAW and The Gimp work for me.

[ewelch]

Not a chance

There is no way this is going to become a standard. There are
fundamental problems with jpegs (other than color space) that
this does not address. Image quality is lost every time you save a
file. It's like taking a clean sheet of paper and crumpling it up.
Then you unfold it and flatten it out. It's no longer perfect. Then
you crumple it up again, and unfold it and it's worse. Any lossy
file format as the respository of the original image is wrong, and
should not be used.

RAW is the future of photography. Period. Whether it's Adobe's
dng or some other format is yet to be determined. But as long as
we have multiple file formats, it's like having 35mm, 126, 110
and disc formats. It makes things more complex. Not better.

And last of all, using HD is an insult to our intelligence. Give
buzzword bingo a rest Microsoft!

[jpsalvesen]

Awe-inspiring!

The scope of this file format is awe-inspiring:

It can replace RAW and JPEG and PNG. It can do all that these formats do.

It can do lossless compression like RAW and PNG. XMP and EXIF stores that metadata our raw processors need.

It can do lossless alpha layers like PNG.

It can do lossy-but-not-terribly-lossy compression that's like JPEG but only better.


And it's open and we're free to implement it in our favorite programming language on our favorite platform.

What a PR stunt, Mr. Ballmer!

[Xenu7]

Give it a rest

"Innovation" from Microsoft means buggy and/or some scheme to increase market share, all at the expense of the ultimate consumer. Thank god we have other options. I feel sorry for all those poor people who are forced to use PCs with Microsoft products on a daily basis. What a nightmare!