An interesting story on EE Times today about a new image processor for digital cameras from NuCore Technologies called CleanCapture. CleanCapture chips lower noise in the analog stage, thefore improving compression using standard algorithms. If an image file contains noise, the noise is treated as data and deteriorates compression efficiency. "A JPEG file created by NuCore's processor is on average a half or one third the size of conventionally processed JPEG files" said Seiichiro Watanabe.