I did a comparative evaluation of both algorithms and, well it’s true that they’re comparable but it doesn’t mean they’re equal. For the same compression ratio, the artefacts introduced by JPEG-2000 are much less perceptible; they’re just more spread over the image. Whereas for HD Photo you get visible artefacts similar to JPEG, especially where you have high contrast, e.g. around printed text.

Unfortunately sometimes JPEG-2000 is just not an option; it’s a very costly algorithm that’s not well suited to the current generation of CPU’s. So my guess is that HD Photo will probably rise faster than JPEG-2000.

A very good point, MJ. It is doubtful that such studies will be undertaken if HD Photo’s domain is just the digital camera market. But if we consider HD Photo for archival purposes (a long shot?), then I agree.

[quote comment="19923"]When you cite Microsoft “HD Photo delivers image quality that is comparable to JPEG-2000 and more than twice the quality of JPEG.”. Maybe they mean what it says, the last mention of JPEG is maybe the plain JPEG and not the JPEG 2000 version. Could that be true?[/quote]

I believe you are right, Sam. The previous sentence claims HD Photo “delivers a lightweight, high performance algorithm with a small memory footprint that enables practical, in-device encoding and decoding” — but high performance and small memory footprint as compared to what?

Sam

The National Library of Medicine website Pubmed:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed

when sent the query –>> jpeg 2000 OR “JPEG 2000″

returns a number of investigations relating to the JPEG 2000 format. Many of these studies were undertaken to determine (a.) whether the format could satisfy medical imaging requirements at all, and (b.) whether less-than-lossless compression would produce results acceptable for critical diagnostic work.

It would be helpful to see how Windows HD Photo performs under similar conditions of evaluation.