JPEG or TIFF, but no RAW...

That's what my SeaLife DC500 offers. If there's a way to get just what the sensor sees onto the SD card, I don't know what it is, and neither does anyone at SeaLife. Therefore....

Would using TIFF as my recording format allow me to do more (i.e., color correction) with photoshop than would the default JPEG? The files penalty is pretty high with my TIFF running almost five times the size as my best JPEG. We're talking about 70 TIFFs on a 512 Mbyte card as opposed to a couple hundred jpegs. Is it worth it to use the TIFFs? Any help would be mucho appreciated.

Tiff is generally a loss-less file format as opposed to JPEG which is lossy, hence the smaller file size. The compression comes from it averaging down the pixels, ie the algorithm looks to the right and left and says, "well this pixel is the same or only slightly different, so we can loose it" (it an extremely simplistic explanation!).

Tiff holds on to all the info, but not the raw camera data, so it's a camera interpretation of all the material, as opposed to a camera interpretation of _some_ of the material. (again verrry simply).

You'll have better results with the tiff files, particularly if you would be making larger prints, but some of the new cameras interpret jpegs very well. I would do some experimentation and see what you like. Go through the whole work flow.

Jack

Yeah, I agree with Jack: try them and see. The problem with TIFF, as you have identified, is the sheer amount of memory space and time it takes. I notice that on their new D200, Nikon have dropped TIFF as an option.

In some ways it depends on what you want the pics for. Charles Hood (of DIVE magazine) argues that for most uses - including commercial - high quality JPG is fine. As long as you don't save/re-save the file repeatedly you should be able to get perfectly acceptable results. But in another thread on this subject, some contibutors argued that JPG will not give you the range of eg, blues, which add so much to a wide-angle pic.

I'm not sure I would want to wait for the time TIFF takes to write to disc after each photo. I found waiting for RAW-writes frustrating enough with a P+S. And there is no doubt you miss pics. I'd try high quality JPG and see how you get on. But once you have the file, I would suggest you do any post-capture work on a copy of the JPG leaving the orginal as an archival file.