Tiffs can be compressed, but an uncompressed tiff shouldn't be any different in image quality from a bmp; tiff has a larger header (tags in a tiff) than a bmp but allows for more information as in artist, software, date, etc. Tiff also has the capacity to store multible images but I don't know that there is any standard for retrieving these additional images and there is a lot of confusion as to what constitutes a "standard" tiff implimentation. For most purposes you're better off using bmp rather than tiff. png is probably even better for general purposes - as long as you aren't trying to make your own deflate based compressor/decompressor (LOL I actually tried that) and keep in mind that not all existing software takes full advantage of the png specification.