Will be JPEG 2000 vs. HD photo the next format war like it was with HD DVD and Blu-ray? It’s rather hard to answer this question right now. While currently most of digital images in the world are stored in JPEG format, rapid development of digital photo technology require new more effective technology at the back and JPEG format approved in 1994 is for sure outdated.

JPEG 2000 offers much better quality/size ratio as well as Microsoft’s new format HD Photo that is claimed to deliver “a lossy compressed image of better perceptive quality than JPEG at less than half the file size”, and that “lossless compressed images … are typically 2.5 times smaller than the original uncompressed data”. Both HD photo and Jpeg 2000 are very similar.

According to JPEG 2000 and HD photo image formats comparison by CS MSU Graphics&Media Lab despite commercial announcements, WMPhoto quality is similar to JPEG2000. Some implementations of JPEG 2000 (better results shows ACDSee, Lurawave and Leadtools Photoshop plugin JPEG 2000 codecs) significantly outperform WMPhoto in objective and subjective comparison.

You could also check up Image Compression Benchmark which stated that JPEG 2000 in most cases outperforms HD photo in lossy compression quality, in lossless compression both image formats are similar in compression ratio but HD photo is faster. JPEG 2000 appeared earlier (in 2000) but still isn’t accepted by industry and isn’t widely supported by hardware and software manufacturers.

While there are only Joint Photographic Experts Group behind Jpeg 2000, HD photo is promoted by powerful Microsoft which could be enough to win. But probably a brand new revolutionary image format could appear to defeat both of them.