Google Takes on JPEG
By Harry McCracken | Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 11:41 am
Stephen Shankland of Cnet reports that Google is about to introduce a graphics file format that stores photos and other images much more efficiently than JPEG, the planet’s dominant image format. Good luck with that: JPEG 2000, an earlier attempt to render JPEG obsolete, never caught on. Neither has JPEG XR, an open standard originally created by Microsoft which I haven’t thought about since it was announced back in 2006. (Back then, it was called Windows Media Photo; it was renamed HD Photo before ending up as JPEG XR.)
2 Comments
Read more:
2 Comments For This Post
September 30th, 2010 at 11:21 pm
JPEG, GIF, and PNG are here to stay because they all accomplish different jobs:
JPEG works best for photographs
GIF handles animation
PNG sacrifices file size for image quality and adjustable transparency
We've seen how much progress the "Burn All GIFs" campaign has made in replacing GIF with some other format. This won't be any different. Why go through all the effort of implementing an entirely new standard that does the same job as a mainstay but only marginally better? Nobody's on dial-up anymore; a couple kilobytes per image is an almost imperceptible difference. (Unless you're on a metered 3G connection, in which case it would probably be best if you had images off entirely.)
October 1st, 2010 at 6:52 am
JPEG 2000 was never supposed to replace traditional JPEG images. JPEG 2000 simply offers an alternative format which is better at some things and worse at other things.