<< I don't know when you last looked at JPEG2000, but interest in it continues to grow and more and more of that interest is being converted into action.>>
I feel a little skeptical about this. JPEG2000 has a lot of really wonderful features for high resolution still images, but it has been around for ten years now and has gained very little traction in the general computer imaging world. I don't know why this is, and I admit I don't know of any more broadly accepted competing openly documented format with similar features. But it says volumes that many of the marvelous web applications that might have been considered naturals for JPEG2000 are instead using other formats (think of things like Google Earth and Microsoft Photosynth and the really cool Gigapan). If JPEG2000 was really such a great solution I'd think it would be in much broader use with web apps that work with high-resolution photo data. Again, I'm not knocking anything about JPEG2000 in a technical sense - only that its support amongst the world of digital graphics is miniscule. It may be growing but not very quickly, given how much the digital graphics world has evolved in the last 10 years. My guess is that either something about JPEG 2000 will change substantially in the next few years or that it will be eclipsed by some other standard that will have similar features but for whatever reason will be more widely adopted. In either event, I'm in no hurry to switch to the current JPEG 2000 implementation. -Steve Rothman
