Ever since I heard about JPEG 2000, I have been waiting to see a new, efficient image format replace JPEG (1992). Needless to say my wait is getting long.

But now a new format is promising even more than JPEG 2000. JPEG XL could replace not only JPEG 1992, but PNG, uniting both lossy and lossless compression into a single format. And according to an excellent presentation by Jon Sneyers, there's good reason to believe this time will manage to take photographic compression more than 2 decades forward! According to the latest press release, reference software should come in Q4 2019.

Crossing fingers Santa will be most generous this year...