A little advice

I have found that it's not neccesary to use the highest setting. At the high setting the pics are difficult to email and take a long time to download. Unless you're going to be doing some heavy editing on the pics the lower setting is just fine. My opinion.

I always use the highest quality setting. it is essential if you are going to print them.

For onscreen viewing it isn't so important.

For emailing just copy the image and reduce the size for sending

gordy,

the lower quality version looks exactly the same because your eyes see the averages of the colors. if you zoom in extremely close, you might be able to notice that a pixel is very slightly darker or lighter. the one that is lower quality will have slightly more randomness in the pixel darkness, which your eye averages out and sees the same thing as the one that is more precise.

I dont know much about printing images, except that the screen can display it better than the printer can print it...but my GUESS is that on a "perfect" printer you might not see any difference, but the worse the printer is the more you might be able to see a difference. It could very well be that you cant tell the difference on any printer, though.

you have 109 pictures the low way, which should be PLENTy right? might as well use it for safety's sake.

you will notice the difference in printing - occasionally i have forgotten to reset the resolution and the results are very different. On screen no problems

Vivien is correct - that's why I use my 5 MB digital camera only for snapshots and count on my Nikon F80 with various, different lenses :wink:

... and since I just got my new 7,200 dpi film scanner today ... :wink:

If image quality is paramount, then it is always best to record the image at the highest available resolution and color depth, and in the least-compressed file format supported by the imaging device (TIFF or RAW are about the best - but most memory-intensive file types; an individual photo may be dozens or even many scores of megabytes depending on resolution and color depth, the various JPG and other compressed file formats are a relatively poor second in terms of fidelity and subsequent intensive image manipulation capability).

Just as is the case with film, additional removeable memory generally is cheaper and more practical than recreating a photo opportunity. The imaging device's memory should be dumped directly to more permanent archival media, or at least to an independent interim storage device such as a fixed or portable hard drive for later archival transfer on a regular basis. That way you always have storage capacity available, and your acquired images are safely stored at the highest quality achievable by your equipment.

When you choose to print or otherwise reproduce or transfer images, any of a number of image file manipulation applications, including many of which may be included with the software provided by the imaging device's manufacturor, can be employed to resize/resample the image file as would be appropriate to the task at hand. If your imaging device's included software doesn't accommodate resize/resample functionality, third-party applications ranging from free web downloads to complex, highly sophisticated, specialized imaging apps costing hundreds of dollars are readily available.

A relatively small image file size is desireable and most practical for web display, emailing, or plain-paper snapshot prints of around 4X5" size, while for larger display prints on photo paper, or if a portion of an image is to be cropped and enlarged, the larger the file size you begin with, the better your end result will be, regardless the capability of your printer. You can always reproduce or otherwise render or transfer an image file in a lower resolution/color depth/compression format than that in which it originally was recorded, but you pretty much can't do anything with image information you don't have to start with.

In short, shoot and archive (and archive frequently) at the highest quality possible, then choose the output scheme appropriate for the desired end product. Take all there is, then you can use just what you need. If it wasn't there to start with, you ain't got it.

Kp it brief 2.

Thanks all especially timberlandko for the TIFF/JPG advice