SEATTLE, WA – At the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference yesterday Microsoft released details regarding the company’s new, proprietary image format “Windows Media Photo” and compared samples of the new format to competing JPEG and JPEG 2000 formats.According to Bill Crow, program manager for Windows Media Photo, the new format will be supported by the in-development OS Windows Vista, will be made available for Windows XP, as well.

“One of the biggest reasons people upgrade their PCs is digital photos,” Crow said, adding that Microsoft has been in contact with manufacturers of printers, digital cameras and other industry partners during the development of Windows Media Photo.

During his presentation, Crow displayed an image with 24:1 compression that clearly contained more detail in the Windows Media Photo version than in the JPEG and JPEG 2000 versions compressed at the same level.

A typical digital camera currently uses 6:1 compression; according to Crow, Windows Media Photo should offer better quality images at double that level of compression.

“We can do it in half the size of a JPEG file,” Crow claimed.

Reduced file size does more than just conserve storage space, Crow noted. “Making a file that is smaller has all kinds of benefits,” he said.

Crow notes that compression which yields a smaller file without a reduction in quality will lead to faster printing, faster transfers across networks and help conserve battery life on cameras and other portable image-related devices.

According to Crow, using Microsoft’s new compression technology, one can also process only a portion of a large image file to show a smaller version, and the new format will allow images to be rotated and otherwise adjusted without having to decode and then encode the image again.

Reaction to the new format has been mixed, thus far, with some critics saying that the success of the format could be impeded by licensing issues. Crow conceded that details pertaining to licensing of the format are still being worked out, but said that “the philosophy has been that licensing should not be a restriction” to the new format being adopted by the market.