Not going to improve tomorrow, but hopefully soon, JPG may actually be an option to raw file type in camera.

Of course it's not going to be as good as or better than tiff/raw/most other image formats, but hopefully one day soon, manufacturers will have the option for this new format type.

See news here: new JPEG format from The Independent JPEG Group (IJG) at the Leipzig Institute for Applied computer science

(as I understand it)The LIA is not the same as the Joint Photographic Experts Group(JPEG) group who ratified the JPEG standard, LIA actually write the code libjpg that is the basis of your software's codec package.

Note too that the page in the link is translated into English(from German??) so there could be a slight loss in translation, but irrespective of this, most the details in the info on this and jpeg in general looks like Greek to me anyhow.

All I can gather from the current news info, is that the new jpg format will encompass a better colour space awareness(ie. WIDE GAMUT COLOR), so in some ways making aRGB a bit redundant.
I'd hazard a guess that this may intially add some confusion into the colour space dilemma that many image editor types eventually stumble upon but eventually once we get use to jpg 9.1, colour space will become a non issue... where one will suffice for all(hopefully!).
The other benefit is the use of 12 bit colour depth for this new format. While it's not going to set the world alight in terms of quality compared to 16 bit, or 32bit/floating point colour depths .. it's still better than 8bit.
And remembering that jpgs major advantage is not quality, but good quality + reduced file size(important for data transference or storage requirements).
The other major revelation is the use of a truly lossless compression setting. It woudl be curious to see quality/file size comparisons to tiff/raw files with this too.

MORE INFO HERE: plus a link to download the new library if you're geeky enough to try it for yourself.
A word of warning with downloading and trying to use this code. Don't unless you know what you are doing!
Your current software may break if you try anything 'non standard'.


I'm assuming that we'll probably see a flurry of activity in the software field with vendors adopting any new format quickly, and hopefully it will then gravitate into the hardware sector within the next few generations of cameras.