Sort-of continuing from my "help me spend my money" thread earlier.... I bought a new (to me, it's 2nd hand) digital camera. It's an Olympus E-10. So for those of you who know anything about digital cameras, that might mean something. It's my 1st ever digital camera (I've used 35-mil cameras since about nineteen-canteen), so I'm re-learning how to "point'n'shoot". I'm rather impressed with the camera (and disappointed with the weather, which changed from bright and sunny to dull and overcast the day after I bought it. Typical!) Getting to the point... One of my intentions is to take shots that can be used as textures/bump-maps/terrain-pictures. If I can come up with any good ones I'll certainly offer them for sharing. The question is: What resolution is "best" for distribution of textures etc., bearing in mind download time, e-mail limits, hard-drive space, rendering time and all the other compromises that have to go on?.... I haven't sorted out (yet) all the options available in the camera, I just know that its best quality is "tiff" (which I assume is the same as "tagged image file format" - ie, large, I haven't tried that yet), whilst it's lower formats all seem to come out as various forms of jpegs. Any guidelines as to what's the best approach would be welcome.. Cheers, Diolma PS: My own hard drive is NOT infinite; I can't keep all that many TIFF images hanging around..:-) Sorry if the above is a little garbled, I'm still trying to work out just what it is I need to achieve in the first place..

The E series are nice, I believe you can purchase accessories for them ( like high powered zoom lenses ). I have a Olympus C5OOO, ( 5.0 megapixel ) it has a 3X zoom ( with a digital boost ). It's ok for general photos, and I have made some texture using it. But it's zoom power is nowhere near my old cannon 35 Mil. Yea TIFF is the uncompressed image format for most digital cameras. you can also set the resolution, which comes in handy for larger prints. I also invested in a second memory card ( my wife gets photo crazy when it comes to the kids events ) The learning curve isn't to difficult for digital cameras, have fun.

change those tiff's to png files tiff isnt better just uncompressed i think png has a lossless compresion too choose that and no pixels of the original will be lost. between 1 and 2 mb is a good size for the average texture file me thinks.