Why did all my statements become 4 gig ?

[bobpc]

Hello,

For the past couple days I've been using my scanner's doc feeder to scan old statements and documents. I want to digitize such things and shred the papers.

However I just noticed that so far all the files are around 4 GB. Giga. Obviously I made a mistake somewhere.

I've been scanning at 300 dpi and saving as compressed TIF file. Each file averages to around 10MB.

I thought 300 dpi is 1:1 print copy but 10 meg is definitely wrong.

Can someone please explain what settings is normally used to scan documents so you are able to view on the computer AND also print a 1:1 copy.

Appreciate any help and advice, thank you.

 

[buwish]

You'll want to start saving the docs and such in either JPEG or GIF format, as TIFF files are much larger. If you save in JPEG format, for example, you'll see file sizes in KB's.

 

[hang-the-9]

10 mb for a document is a bit much unless it has images and color that you need. If the stuff is pretty much all black and white, set the scanner to grey-scale, you will have sub-1mb files. For text scanning, you can go to 200dpi also to lower size.

You are probably getting 10mb files due to scanning in color, which adds a lot more information to the image.

I'd have to disagree a bit with buwish, TIFFs are a great mix between image quality and size, to get GIF and JPEG files small, you would loose quite a bit of sharpness in the text if you need to print out a good looking copy. GIF and JPEG standards were made to look OK on screen and for fast downloading, not for printing.

Set scanner to 200dpi, greyscale, or B&W, and your file size will drop a lot. Print out a sample and see how it looks, if not good, go to 300dpi.