Adobe and Microsoft are pushing a new HD Photo format.
The new format supports a broader color gamut making it ideal for digital camera photography.
It can store 16 or 32 bits of data for each color, compared with JPEG's 8 bits, making it easier to discern shadow details or the subtle tonal variations of snow in sunlight.
It compresses data twice as efficiently as JPEG, with either twice the quality at a given file size or half the file size at a given quality.
It's designed to work well in camera image-processing chips, and to reduce memory requirements, it encodes images chunk by chunk without having to store the complete image at one time.
Microsoft has built support for the newer format into Windows Vista.
