Microsoft, as Microsoft is wont to do, offers a closed-source alternative to JPEG 2000 known as HD Photo or Windows Media Photo. But if you're willing to pump up the file size, you aren't losing any fidelity by presenting JPEG images.
It takes a lot more bits per pixel to create a JPEG image that looks as good as a JPEG 2000 image. JPEG 2000 not only compresses more efficiently, it also does a better job of hiding its compression artifacts, too. Click on the images to download the actual JPEG 2000 files most modern photo editing software can view them natively. No current web browsers can render JPEG 2000 (.jp2) images, so what you're seeing are extremely high quality JPEG versions of the JPEG 2000 images. Let's see what happens when we take the two worst-looking images from that comparison – the ones with JPEG compression factor 40 and 50 – and use JPEG 2000 to produce images of (nearly) the exact same size: You may remember my comparsion of JPEG compression levels entry from last year.
And since we always seem to have a lot more CPU time than bandwidth, this is a perfect tradeoff. The promise of JPEG 2000 is higher image quality in much smaller file sizes, at the minor cost of additional CPU time. It's the logical heir to the JPEG throne. There's even a sequel of sorts to JPEG known as JPEG 2000. But there are newer, more modern choices these days. It's a perfectly serviceable image compression format. I can't remember when I encountered my first JPEG image, but JPEG didn't appear to enter practical use until the early 90's. It's surprising that the venerable JPEG image compression standard, which dates back to 1986, is still the best we can do for photographic image compression.
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