Microsoft Corp. will soon submit a new photo format to an international standards organization that it says offers higher quality images with better compression, the company said on Thursday. The format, HD Photo -- recently renamed from Windows Media Photo -- is taking aim at the JPEG format, a 15-year old technology still widely used in digital cameras and image applications. Both formats take images and use compression to make the file sizes smaller so more photos can fit on a memory card. During compression, however, the quality of the photo tends to degrade. Microsoft said HD Photo's lightweight algorithm causes less damage to photos during compression, with higher-quality images that are half the size of JPEG. The format can also accommodate "lossless" and "lossy" compression, two methods of compressing photo data with different effects on image quality. Microsoft said adjustments can be made to color balance and exposure settings that won't discard or truncate data that occurs with other bitmap formats. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129676/article.html Thanks & Regards, Farooque Shaheen, Caritor India Pvt Ltd. Tel. 080-26678388 Ext. 4105 VOIP- 40366 -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.