Starting this year, I’m starting to scan all my bills and letters etc so I have an electronic copy.
But I’m at a loss as to what to scan them in at and save as.
I was assuming PDF but what res is best? I don’t really intend to print them, just store them on the PC but I don’t want 5Mb+ files.
Anyone got any ideas?
Most modern scanners default to 300dpi which should be more than enough , assuming you don’t require colour detail , scan as greyscale (48bit for B/W photo quality and 16bit for photocopier quality) and save as JPEG - gives different quality levels to save , or TIFF for even greater compression. these methods can give file sizes of just a few K , Remember you can only lose detail with these high compression methods , never to be recovered.
Cheers Mortlake.
Bills etc have colours but I dont need the colour so grayscale it is then.
You could save them as PDFs if you want to, by pasting the scans into an Open Office Writer document and use the save as PDF function.
exactly how we store our docs here at work 
DT.
Ah. Does that save space? I can scan straight into a PDF with Xsane
Try 208 DPI. That is the same resolution as FINE for a FAX. Most High End Scan Doc companies use 208 as the standard for DOC’s without Photo’s or color required, and only 300 when Color is a must. They typically us 208 Grey Scale 98% of time. I wrote many years ago a DOC Image system, and well it was amazing what the 208 ver 300 was on storage. We used a JPEG style compression for the images back then - sort of based on 7/8 Bit ZIP style for space (only had 9 G HD’s then). Ok so I’m old…