Microsoft Set To Release HDPhoto Plug-in For Photoshop

Microsoft announced that they are releasing plug-ins for Photoshop that add support for the company's new and intriguing image file format, HD Photo. The plug-ins will be available for both Windows and Mac versions of Photoshop CS2 and CS3 and will initially released in beta form, with a final release due sometime in May. The HD Photo plug-ins will be available free of charge. HD Photo support is already included as part of Windows Vista. According to Microsoft:

HD Photo supports a wide range of features including:
Multiple color formats for display or print
Fixed or floating point high-dynamic-range image encoding
Lossless or high-quality lossy compression
Efficient decoding for multiple resolutions and subregions
Minimal overhead for format conversion or transformations during decode

HD Photo delivers a lightweight, high performance algorithm with a small
memory footprint that enables practical, in-device encoding and decoding. It
delivers compression quality comparable with JPEG-2000 and more than twice the
quality of JPEG.

Worth a look at least, but what it will offer beyond other high spec file formats, remains to be seen.