Digital BW, The Print

On Dec 4, 2004, at 10:23 PM, Anthony G. Atkielski wrote:
> Unfortunately, I don't have any decent support for JPEG2000 in my
> image-editing applications, and obtaining it does not justify the cost
> and nightmare of "upgrading" Photoshop or other tools to more recent
> versions.

But that would be the same argument against these other superior 
compressors too... so it's not really a factor.

JPEG2000 is the best bet today, if you asked me as an archivist for 
something superior to JPEG. There was just an archival-oriented 
JPEG2000 conference a few months back, in fact. It's pretty widely 
supported - though not deeply supported (very few apps can really 
exploit it's cool *new* features, but lots of apps can just use it like 
another flat image compressor).

It has more pleasing artifacts (than JPEG)
It delivers much better results at much higher compression ratios (than 
JPEG)
and has support for lots of features - like >3 color channels, a good 
metadata implementation, etc - that are important in an archive.

Plus, since like JPEG, you don't use it as an interim format, if you're 
archiving a file at most what you need to do is decompress it for print 
or repurposing later. There are free JPEG2000 converters to generate a 
TIFF, for instance, without having to upgrade Photoshop. In fact, if 
you write code, it'd be an awfully short app to do it via Quicktime 
APIs (which support JPEG2000 since v6).

Cheers,

Roger