Family Historian User Group

What format should I go for, pdf, jpg, tiff or other. It's going to cost £50ish so would like a straw poll.

ID:2069

I would go for TIFF, but look here for comparison

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... le_formats

TIFF is going to give you the highest quality image, might be important if you need to zoom in a lot or process/enhance the image to get at the detail. TIFF files are larger than JPG though.

Don't use PDF, you won't be able to play with the image in a graphics program to enhance it etc.

Mark

You don't say what type of document but TIFF would also give you the option to do OCR if the document was suitable.

You also don't say what resolution or what type of compression algorithm (if any) you are proposing.  Both these are crucial.

All scans of microfiche will initially be in TIFF format but, as others have pointed out, the file sizes could be large - astronomically if scanned in colour.  It is essential to know how you prpoose to use the scanned files. Note that any form of lossy compression (most) will lead to degradation of the image - just look at images on Ancestry or any other site to see what I mean.

Oh! so Technical. All I want to do is load the CD and read each page as an A4 page. [confused]

We may be able to help further if you explain what sort of data it is, modern clean microfiche is easier to read what ever the format, if you are looking a old parish registers, you need to scan larger and a different save type may be better.

Parish Marriage Records. I have 4 microfiche (6x4) with 60 pages on each. The company I contacted have asked me in what format I want them reproduced. They will burn to a CD or email the files to me. I told them I want to be able to read them on my computer with something like Windows Picture and Fax Viewer or Adobe Reader program. Don't want to have to purchase software to read them.

I would ask for Tiff, but make sure they will do a 256 grayscale and no a two colour scan as with old parish records they can be tricky if converted to two colour rather than greyscale. If you might want to attach them to FH make sure they use uncompressed Tiif, or tiff not using the GIF compression algorithm which FH does not support.

Thanks Jane. Sounds good to me, I'll go with that.