xD-Picture Card: Quality Loss?

[Ecks Vanguard]

I was speaking with a Black's employee who told me today that i won't lose the quality of my picture if i keep it on the digital card and bring them that to develop, instead of transferring the pictures onto comp and burning them onto a cd and THEN giving them that.

Is it me, or was the employee just trying to save themselves time?
And if so how are they saving time?

Thanx for any insight.

[drg]

I don't think saving time is the issue? Copy or downloading to your Computer (PC or Apple) won't make any difference in the image.

Several possible explanantion for this comment that could range from innocent to cynical.

Could be a question came up in the conversation that the employee didn't fully understand?

Could be someone wants to sell more memory cards?

You can always reload the xD card (or any memory card for that matter) from your computer.
They are handy to carry in and use. I've bought several small 32-64M size to run in and get quick prints or just to hand to the lab.

Should never be degradation (unless a change is made in the file with software) in digital formats.
Do remember that if you edit, save only the final image as a JPEG. Each JPEG compression cycle will degrade the image. Intermediate or works in progress save only as TIFF or BMP (or the internal to your software like PSD in Photoshop).

Good luck - C

[another view]

Like the above poster said in the last paragraph, image degradation happens when you edit the image and re-save as a jpeg. What happens is that data is compressed when creating the file, then you compress it again every time you save it again. When you save as a TIFF, you lose nothing (but your file size is huge). But transferring the images to the computer, then burning them to a CD won't degrade the files - as long as you don't edit and re-save the files.

So what do you do if you want to edit a file? In most cases, you could edit the image that was shot as a jpeg, save it again (select the least amount of compression or highest quality level here) and be fine even with a print. You could even save it a couple of times this way and it would be unlikely that you'd have a problem. If you want to see what happens, bring up a fairly detailed image in photoshop. Save it as a copy (so you don't lose the original!) with a low quality. Save it again several times. Eventually you'll see that you're losing detail. Keep going and it will just get worse. But it will take a few saves before you start seeing it.

Something that's a portfolio piece or a big print - an important image - I'd handle differently. Edit the original jpeg file. Save as a TIFF as you're working on it, and keep the master copy this way. Then save a copy of this TIFF as a high-quality jpeg to bring to the lab for printing.