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The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), whose members include the National Archives, the British Library and the BBC, has published a report by Dr Robert Buckley, a research fellow with Xerox's Imaging and Services Technology Centre, which concludes that JPEG 2000 "represents a great stride forward for the archival community".

It took them some time to notice, however.

As its name suggests, the format was introduced in 2000, but has made little impact, largely because it offers few benefits over JPEG while having significant drawbacks. Higher processing power is required to work with images, and a lack of

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support for EXIF data prevented its adoption in digital cameras.

But neither factor is particularly problematic when archiving documents. Unlike standard JPEG the 2000 format supports lossless compression, and when compression is employed it does away with the artefacts that are common to compressed JPEGs.

"JPEG 2000 offers significantly more features and flexibility than JPEG and other compression methods at the cost of more complexity in its use," says Buckley.

Buckley also highlighted other advantages, such as a single JPEG 2000 master image being able supply multiple derivative images and "generous" support for XML metadata (EXIF aside).

While the report endorses one successor to JPEG, another might yet prove more enduring. The Joint Photographic Expert Group, which developed both the JPEG and JPEG 2000 formats, has begun work on a new format that will be based extensively on Microsoft's HD Photo technology.