[mdawson]

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As for MS and their "promise", wouldn't trust Redmond as far as I could spit.

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That may be giving Microsoft more leeway that they deserve. I would have to say that Microsoft can be trusted about as far as an amoeba can toss the planet.

[samrod]

While I agree with many of you on this issue. Let's' keep one thing in mind.
Regardless of Microsoft's intentions, if it deliberately stands by to let its technology spread, it will have then given up any intellectual property claims it once had on it. Intellectual Property laws require that you actively defend your claims when you know they're being infringed. Failure to do so revokes your right to do so in the future. The goal was specifically to avoid situations where a company knowingly stands by as others market and develop its technology, only to pounce on them for significantly larger rewards than had it originally developed and marketed it on its own.
Now, JPEG2000 also has some cool ways of displaying partially loaded images. Does HD Photo support any of those?

[meta]

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Regardless of Microsoft's intentions, if it deliberately stands by to let its technology spread, it will have then given up any intellectual property claims it once had on it. Intellectual Property laws require that you actively defend your claims when you know they're being infringed. Failure to do so revokes your right to do so in the future.

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Utterly incorrect, except when you're talking about trademarks. And I don't think anybody cares whether Microsoft has a trademark on the name of HD Photo or not.

[leodavinci]

After reading this article, the old expression "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." comes to mind.
Didn't that little embroglio with Forgent Networks over the JPEG format teach them anything?
Guess not.

[Benny_Hill]

I think it is about time to tranfer all your important jpeg files into hardcopy before jpeg disapear, if everyone think that after 50 or more years they can still open a CD-R full of JPG, it will be a big mistake, format is like digital it will never last, someone will make it move-on, and all your important jpeg will vanish in no time.

[aestival]

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Microsoft aside, the need for compressed file formats will be around for quite some time. The points you bring forth are true for desktops connected to the Internet via broadband, but that is one instance. With the growing number of handheld devices holding music, photos and video, something has to be in place to get as much content as possible into limited storage capacity, preferably with little to no (perceivable) loss of quality. Even the top-of-the-line hard drive-based 80GB iPod is of limited capacity in the Content Age.
Place uncompressed music on an 80GB iPod at an average of 10MB per song and suddenly you can only store about 8000 songs are so. While that is more than enough for a great many people, most people do not buy the top-of-the-line highest capacity iPod. Also, the iPods buffer would always be quickly exhausted requiring the hard drive to refill it more often and therefore quickly diminish battery life. Laptops, which are very popular amongst the younger computer users that are more likely to have more content, are also limited in terms of storage. While 2.5-inch hard drives are available in capacities up to 250 GB, most laptops sold today have anywhere from 60 to 120 GB of hard drive storage and unlike an iPod that space is occupied by more than just entertainment content.

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Whoa... we're talking about still images here -- no need to fly off the handle about audio and video, which will obviously remain compressed for some time, since they tend to be far less compressible without loss, and especially since we'd all like higher resolution video with a perfectly smooth frame rate. That being said, compressed audio's days are already numbered.
As for your sort-of-point about limited handheld storage, since those devices also have very limited resolution (even the iPhone and PSP), I can't see still image compression being an issue, unless you're some kind of packrat moron wanting to cram 400,000 images on your 80GB iPod.

[aestival]

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What we need WAY more is a single RAW file format that all cameras write to. Now that would be a useful standard that I could get behind! DNG or some other file format, doesn't matter. Just give us one and get rid of this proprietary nonsense camera makers try to lock us into

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Couldn't agree more. As for MS and their "promise", wouldn't trust Redmond as far as I could spit.

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What's wrong with TIFF?

[SGP_MacUser]

Many here contributed highly respected opinions. I like to contribute my observations and doubts.
Now, MS want to establish a file format for pictures, superceding the obvious standard, JPEG (albeit a little old and could be enhanced).
Besides this, MS other current strategies on file formats:
1. OOXML (Office Open XML) file format to compete with OpenDocument
2. XPS to compete with Acrobat.
Past strategies:
1. AVI versus Quicktime.
Usually, other players innovate and created a new format to fill a purpose for the new technology requirements. What is MS up to? (A case study here).
However, MS appears to try to dominate those established base format.
File formats are also some ground rules in computing world. We must be careful.

[Ilgaz]

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Jpeg 2000???? - nuff said!

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Well, I knew someone would say it. Yes, JP2 exists, yes it could be better but the companies owning those patents and having working SDK such as LuraTech are complete stupid or they really know what they are doing to prevent format to take off. We see what happens now.
A basic example. Jp2 is not supported out of the box on Windows. Lets say you are a user wanting to convert TIFF to Jpeg 2000 instead of jpeg. "Cheapest" way? Get Irfanview, freeware and buy Luratech Jp2 plugin for it. What does it cost? $30!
http://www.luratech.de/shop/jp2
I better remind that Mr. Thorsten Lemke released his years of excellent work a week ago for similar price, entire Graphic Converter costs $35 for full version. They try to charge $30 for an option in a freeware application which can't be used professionally (while great for other stuff)
If it is not supported at Windows out of the box, it never becomes standard. I was joking with HD-Photo all over CNET etc. comments but if JPEG committee gets involved and it becomes open, C/C SDK, we will finally get rid of those horrible issues. I don't think MS can pull tricks to Jpeg committee, they aren't couple of geeks like Mono guys, they know this "patent" etc. stuff well.

[Ilgaz]

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I think it is about time to tranfer all your important jpeg files into hardcopy before jpeg disapear, if everyone think that after 50 or more years they can still open a CD-R full of JPG, it will be a big mistake, format is like digital it will never last, someone will make it move-on, and all your important jpeg will vanish in no time.

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It CAN'T vanish because it is open specification and lets say if all companies try to vanish it, there are stuff like:
'fink info libjpeg'
Information about 7291 packages read in 1 seconds.
libjpeg-6b-17: JPEG image format handling library
All open source.

[samrod]

Not being a lawyer, I'm merely making this claim based on the barrage of news of patent lawsuits we've been reading about over the years. I've read way too many times that knowingly letting others profit off your patent without pursuing any action, for an extended period of time, effectively grants the violator an easement on your patent.

[nelson92]

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What's wrong with TIFF?

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RAW gives much more latitude and no matter what adjustments you make before saving as .tiff, .jpeg or whatever, the original file remains just as you took it.

[aestival]

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What's wrong with TIFF?

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RAW gives much more latitude and no matter what adjustments you make before saving as .tiff, .jpeg or whatever, the original file remains just as you took it.

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How does RAW give more latitude? -- I assume it's something to do with pixels on a camera normally being R, G, G, and B, rather than all RGB, but TIFF can encompass that with an added tag that says something like "this file is RGGB". Where TIFF falls flat is 12bit RGGB, since I believe it's only 16bit, but presumably image sensors will eventually mostly be 16bit. Maybe I'm missing something, but TIFF seems like the best way to go, and it supports both lossless (LZW/ZIP) and lossy (JPEG) compression already. My only complaint with TIFF is Photoshop's crappy support for cross-platform TIFFs, but that's an Adobe issue, not a TIFF issue.
Actually, I was sure TIFFs supported EXIF and other info tags, but maybe I'm wrong there as well -- are TIFFs not fully commented in the same way as RAW images?

[richcon]

HDPhoto compresses images with efficiency "comperable" to JPEG2000. So why do we need a new standard?
JPEG2000's got alpha channels. JPEG2000's does great compression, and when it is compressed too small, its artifacts are much less jarring than JPEG's. It's got both lossy and lossless modes. And it could revolutionize the presentation of graphics on web pages if only it would be supported on Windows. Out of the box, the only OS that ever bothered to support JPEG2000 is Mac OS X.
Of course, Microsoft would rather create their own standard than support an existing one, even if theirs can only match the old one for compression efficiency and comes out nearly a decade later.
By the way, the formerly bad licensing terms behind JPEG2000 have long since been cleared up.
(Now, it's not entirely Microsoft's fault here. Firefox still doesn't support JPEG2000 either, even though users have been asking for it for nearly a decade and compatible libraries do exist. Supposedly, they'll be getting support after this summer via a Google Summer of Code project.)