Thursday, June 23, 2005

Today, all digital cameras support a popular image format called JPEG, which offers so-called lossy compression, in which data is actually deleted to make file sizes smaller. Most cameras offer a few quality settings, and my advice is to always use the highest-quality setting that your digital camera offers so that you get the best possible images.

But JPEG images have problems. The most egregious is that every time you edit a JPEG image and resave the file, it's recompressed, so you lose data again. It's possible to literally degrade the quality of JPEG images over time—a scary proposition. One way to avoid this problem is to make backups of the original photos each time you copy them to your PC. But for an emerging generation of digital-photography power users, there's an even better solution: It's called Raw image format.

Early this month, Microsoft revealed that it would natively support Raw image files in Longhorn, its next generation Windows operating system and, to a lesser extent, in Windows XP as well, through a free Power Toy add-on. Most Windows users are probably unfamiliar with Raw images, however, so I spoke recently with Josh Weisberg, Group Product Manager for Windows Digital Media at Microsoft about this development and how it will make Longhorn more attractive to digital camera users.