Furthermore, when converting to lossy formats such as highly compressed GIF or JPG formats, not only is significant data permanently lost, but artifacts that reduce the overall value of the photo are introduced that can simply not be removed.

Despite what you may have been told, TIF is the best format for archiving documents and RAW is the very best photographic format.

TIF is the format prefered by the Smithsonian Institution for preserving digital copies of documents. At 16 bits, Tiff files are lossless. That means none of the original color, saturation or other data is lost. Tiff files can be compressed as much as any jpg without losing any photo data and without any loss of photo detail. There will also never be any introduction of moire or other artifacts, as there is with jog and even BMP and PNG.

RAW is the format prefered for perserving the most data about photographs as it is also lossless and preserves data that no other format even knows about such as white balance, color depth, etc. RAW format has 12 bits and has a color depth of 4096 intensities for each pixel. JPG at 8 bits has only 256 intensities for each pixel (and remember, due to the lossy nature of jpg, depending on how much compression is used, there are actually fewer (sometimes significantly fewer) unique pixels to begin with as compared with RAW or TIF).

If you lack the skill to know the difference, or you think that JPG is good enough for your photos, then saving as a JPG is certainly good enough for you.

The only disadvantage to RAW files is that they have to be converted to TIF or JPG to print them, unless you are particularly well off and can afford a printer that handles RAW format. The other main disadvantage with RAW format is that they take up alot of space. That means you can store fewer pics.

Other formats are OK for the snapshot/amateur crowd, but pros prefer RAW or TIFF.

That brings me to my analysis of the tif format as implements in Scanitto. While I have recommended TIF format, I am refering to 16 bit TIF. Scanitto only produces lossy 8 bit TIF files. Not archival. Purely amateur software for those too lazy to find the right drivers and software for thier scanners.

If you have any decent graphics editor, it probably already has pic scanning built in.

As for this program, it does not play well with other scanner software. It even caused problems with both MS Office programs mentioned, and also caused problems with Corel programs with scanning capabilities.

After installing this Scanitto junk software every other program reported that the scanner was jammed (although it was not – removing this junk returned all functionality to the other programs).

Could not tell you if it is any good, I never got it to work in the first five minutes. And, it is clearly not worth investing any further time.

Some tips for scanning:

If you are going to send a document as a fax DOC, save as multipage tiff. TIF is best for any document as it contains the most information for document archive purposes. If you just want to knock something out, any format will do. However, for document archival purposes TIF is best.

If you have a high quality image, save it in the RAW format. That is one of the greatest problems with Scannito (after the apparent fact that it fights other software): it does not save in any RAW format, as does Canon and HP software.

RAW files are a little large, but you retain the ability to directly edit white balance, black balance and other important photographic data that gets lost in any other format (including PNG and BMP, but particularly GIF and JPG or any other compressed format). Many amateurs make the mistake of saving thier important pics in another format like PNG or BMP thinking that those formats save this important information, but RAW is the only format that saves all photo data and is always the best for photo editing.