Stoked for HD Photo
Am I the only person the least bit excited about HD Photo? I know JPEG works and all, but let’s face it, it’s not particularly high quality or efficient, and it’s we’re long overdue for a successor. JPEG 2000 was a monumental failure in the market because of developer trepidation and some glaring oversights (no EXIF support??); RAW is great for what it is, but the format itself is fragmented for each major camera maker, and has little use for anything but pro photography. What we need is an efficient and high quality lossy standard (with lossless support, of course), EXIF, transparency, and all the other cross-environment features that will make it possible to live and work with a single file format online, offline, and in your camera. The sooner we can ditch JPEG, GIF, and PNG, in my opinion, the better. A free Photoshop plugin, Vista support, free license for use under Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise (shortly), and supposed device support around the corner will with any luck be enough to kickstart this thing.
I'm an editor and technology critic in the midst of founding a new web startup: 
IMHO the user base and the vast majority of applications and products designed and built for JPEG will take a while till it’s phased out.
I assume that an overlap will be introduced with products supporting the HD Photo format but don’t forget what happened / what is happening with MP3 and OGG for instance.
It would also be interesting to see what the chip manufacturers have to say for hardware encoding / decoding of the format, power consumption, integration with existing chip technology etc.
An interesting reference is “Microsoft claims that HD Photo offers a “perceptible image quality comparable to JPEG 2000 with computational and memory performance more closely comparable to JPEG and delivers a lossy compressed image of better perceptive quality than JPEG at less than half the file size, and that the lossless compression compresses images 2.5 times”.”
Yeah, JPEG 2000, that was sad, wasn’t it?
1. Will it be safe to write software for, or will we be sued into oblivion or otherwise limited?
2. Does it work on Flickr?
When it finalizes under Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise that means it’s free IP afaik, although I suppose they would continue to control the standard. They want people to develop for it, that’s the whole idea. As for Flickr, well, it’s less about whether photo sharing services support it, and more about whether the browsers do.
Hey Ryan, you should check this out about HD Photo
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=297447