Ok I am thinking about buying a HP s20 scanner, I have a flatbed scanner it does a great job but I want to know if I will get better quality from the negative scans(In other words is it going to be worth the 20mb files its going to create). Also I switched to tif images I was using jpeg on my scanned images. Now I do not modify the original in any way if I do any modifications I save to a different file. But I notice that the tif is alot bigger files. Is tiff compression lossless or am I wasting my time saving in tif/I have like 5gb of photos and not near finished.

-- Tab (mheaton907@earthlink.net), June 22, 2000

Answers

Tab:
TIF compression is not a lossy compression - that's the reason for the jumbo files. I personally have an S20 and love it. If I had lot's and lot's to do - and a commercial reason I would buy a Nikon scanner - but my negative and slide scanning requirements are modest.
JPG is lossy - but the resulting quality really depends on the image content. Unfortunately it is a very subjective decision but generally if you have a lot of geometric lines and high contrast with fine detail, or text - JPG will eat your images up. If you have wide expanses and consistent texture a JPG compressed image will be mostly indistinguishable from the original... sometimes.
If I may make a suggestion: If you take good care of your negatives/slides, then save hard-disk space and use JPG - unless you see significant degradation.
You will get better results scanning from the negatives. Scanning from negatives and slides preserves a much wider tonal range then you can get by scanning prints. Printing the slide or negative reduces the tonal range - scanning the picture then reduces it more. To avoid this cascading degradation you should scan the slides or negatives directly.

Des

-- Dan Desjardins (dan.desjardins@avstarnews.com), June 22, 2000.