StupidScript - 6:27 pm on May 26, 2006 (gmt 0)

Aaaaah! Subterfuge! Subterfuge!

JPEG is only valuable as a web image format. It's used by many digital cameras because of its "lossy" compression's ability to compress the image file data and fit more image files on the limited media storage devices current lower-end cameras have available to them.

Professional photographers who care about the quality of their pictures don't use JPEG ... it's too ugly. They use the TIFF (lossless LZW compression) and/or RAW (no compression) formats, and then produce copies for web distribution in JPEG with minimal compression.

MS wants to have the only browser that supports their format, so when Kodak and the other hardware producers start to include it in their products and MS-philes start to include the images on their websites the other browser mfrs will have to pay a license fee to MS or get out of the game. "Licensing issues"? You can bet that there will be only two: Who qualifies for one and how much it will cost.

If it was a question of producing quality compressed images, MS would have gone with a lossless format. They are fully aware that (in no small part through their own re-education of the public through the distribution of their products) the web-surfing public has low expectations for truly quality images.

I remember when personal computors first started sending the output of their amazingly crappy dot-matrix printers in to a printing press shop I worked for, and the owner of the shop refused to duplicate the dot output because of the damage it would do to his business when he became associated with that ugly stuff. Of course, that has changed to the point where most people would say that a photo looked "great", even with substantial compression artifacts because they simply have no recollection of what a truly "great" looking photo looks like ... printed from film onto continuous-tone media.