Great experiment, bagginsbill, and great analogy to sweeping floors. That backs up exactly what I've found in my own graphics-manipulation projects--that I can save an image three or four times as high-quality-setting JPEG images, with no noticable loss in quality. If I am doing a large project that I will be backing up many times, I save it as PSDs while I'm working on it (although that is mostly because PSDs save layers, the lack of image quality worries is just a nice side effect ). Then at the end I save it as a JPEG, normally with a high quality level. The only times I have generated bad-quality photos were when I had the quality level set too low (and even then the photos were usually fine for web use). Renders from Poser get exported as JPEGs or PSDs, depending on what I'm going to do with them.

~*I've made it my mission to build Cyberworld, one polygon at a time*~

Watch it happen at my technology blog, Building Cyberworld.