JPEG? RAW? How about both? (XDepth RAW)

Imaging Insider, Crunch Gear, and the Megapixel blog among many other places have posted an announcement by Trellis Inc on their new XDepth RAW technologies, that offer a best-of-both worlds JPEG and RAW interoperability format. More details at the XDepth website. The software will be shown at the PDN PhotoPlus Expo which tips off on Thursday October 23, 2008.

XDepth RAW promises quite a few miracles and wonders, including:

• files treated as JPEGs by existing applications but they are RAW files too
  
• takes up less space, on average 0.2 MB per megapixel, versus 1.5 MB now (MB = megabytes)
  
• 7:1 compression ratio compared to a traditional uncompressed RAW file
  
• can store up to 72 bits per pixel

You can also discuss this in their forums, which are not very busy at the moment.