"Wolf K" wrote

| So the obvious question becomes: Who is going to
| be in charge to establish standards and decide on
| priorities?
|
| ISO.

I didn't know about that organization. Good idea.

| And what happens to commercial entities that
| stand to lose? For instance, camera companies that
| have to remake their hardware/software in order to
| store some universal format to replace JPG, that
| everyone agrees on... at least this year. There's rarely
| standardization in commercial products unless it
| favors the sellers. It usually doesn't.
|
| Image format is software, not hardware.

Yes. That's just an example. The hardware/software
will need to work together, no?

| All cameras capture the image in
| some proprietary RAW format. Amateur cameras immediately process the RAW
| image, ending with compression to JPG. Our oldest camera actually
| displays "Busy" on the screen while it does this. Some parameters, such
| as white balance, can be set by the user.
|
| The alternative would have to be much larger memory cards, frequent
| exchange for fresh ones in the field, and post-processing at home.

Yes, but the standard could be changed to PNG,
TIF (just a zipped bitmap), or some newer, non-lossy,
compressed format, such as an improved non-lossy
JPG. It would make sense, but it would require a
lot of work for everyone to adapt, from camera makers
to software makers to photographers. And since
many photographers want metadata in their digital
photos, the new standard format would need to
accomodate that.

Then multiply that work across all current data
formats. There would be a lot of resistance. And
many formats are proprietary. Companies protect
their secrets so that competitors can't work with
the format. for instance, DOC was made public only
a few years ago. As far as I know, DOCX is still not
public. Thus, Libre Office can't quite match an MS
Word DOCX with complex formatting. No one can
force MS to make that public or standardize the
structure.