2006.04.19 10:45 "[Tiff] TIFF + Group4 will last 10 years?", by Rui Castro

2006.04.19 23:41 "Re: [Tiff] PDF/A vs. TIFF", by Graeme Gill

MUCH smaller file sizes courtesy of JBIG2! And the possibility of JPEG2000 for color images. PLUS, the ability to do "image segmentation"

JBIG2 and JPEG2000 use patented algorithms so they are not as useful as they should be.

Patents, provided they are covered by "reasonable licensing" aren't considered a limiting factor in ISO standards. So that's a non-issue.

If all your world is commercial software, then yes this may work. But then again, there have been rumblings even in the IEEE and other standards bodies about problems caused by the the loose definition of "reasonable licensing", and the way some companies seem to end up making a lot of money from patents they introduce into a standard.

But history proves that if you want wide acceptance of a format, you'd better make it free of cost, and "reasonable licensing" doesn't allow this. (Remember JPEG and arithmetic encoding? Why did PNG get invented ?)

Another thing that's kind of amusing about JPEG2000, is that at least one comparison I came across, indicated that while much more complicated that JPEG, and doing a better job on highly compressed files, it actually does a worse job in high quality, lower compression situations.

Graeme Gill.