Dear Friends,

Last August I asked advice about buying a scanner and external cd/dvd burner
for my wife , but it turned out that the museum in question forbade
scanners!  Grrr.  So the decision was put off, until now.

Today I went out and bought an Epson Perfection 4490 Photo, for the specific
purpose of scanning several hundred historical documents (mainly letters,
handwritten).  I have succeeded in scanning a document into my laptop, so I
know that everything works, but my question is: what format should I use?
 JPEGs deteriorate with multiple copying--right?  (That's what the Epsons
instructions say.)   Should I use BITMAP or TIFF?  A major factor is the
time required to make an individual scan.  Since we have hundreds of
documents to scan, we don't want this to stretch into July, but we also want
good-quality files in a format that is widely usable.  My test runs on both
BITMAP or TIFF seem to take about 20 seconds per scan.  Does that sound
right?  Sorry to be such an ignoramus.

Any suggestions will be most gratefully received.

Henry Wiencek

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