Hey Greg,

When you scan your chips, do you touch them up too?

The other thing about saving files as JPG format that I do not like is the inability to make the certain colors transparent. Try putting a scanned JPG on a colored background. Notice that the excess areas that make up the rectangle now shows up as a white area. With GIFs, you can make those areas transparent, which can then "blend" into the page.

I am not also saying that GIF is the only way to go. In instances where there are a lot of gradient colors, JPG do look better (and would be a better choice). I just find that generally, you can get by with a GIF file. As mentioned before, some people also like making the scans interlaced. This is where the image shows up immediately, but is blurry, then gradually gets into focus. Gives the visual feedback that something is happening, and the user thinks that the page is loading faster (it does not, it loads at the same rate). You cannot do this with JPG.

As an extrme example, make an image with only 2 colors. Say a rectangle 40 pixels by 20 pixels. (40 wide and 20 tall). Make the left square all black and the right square all white. In this extreme case, only 2 colors are used (2 bit), why save it as a JPG (using thousands or millions of colors) when only 2 color is needed. In some cases, some of the newer programs will be intelligent enough to automatically reduce the color set to what is actually needed. Some will assume that thousands of colors are needed, and therefore make the file much larger than needed.

Sorry about the rambling.

Joe