Digital Photo Format

[Kurt]

Ok, I bit the bullet and bought a digital SLR: Nikon D100. I couldn't see going from my trusty film SLR (15+ year old Nikon FG) to a compact digital when for less than US $2000 I could get what appears to be it's digital equivelent (and better is some respects). But, oh my lord is it complicated.

Question here now is, in what format should I be saving my photo's? The camera offers the following:

For a 3000 X 2000 shot:
1) Raw (very big file size like 9MB each)
2) TIFF (even bigger at 17MB)
3) JPEG Fine (2.7MB)
4) JPEG Normal (1.4MB)
5) JPEG Basic (736KB)

I've heard that JPEG compresses images when saved. I presume this is at the expense of quality. Somewhere here on this forum I also heard that the quality is degraded further on each save (hard to believe).

All photo's I would like to keep at the optimal quality. I could then later edit photo's for email or web posting. But I may want to make prints from them so would like the original to be the best I can manage.

Also, for printing purposes, what type of resolution would I want if I was expecting to make 8 X 10 prints? Is there a good rule of thumb I can use?

I ordered the camera with a 1GB flash memory (300USD) but even that will go quickly at large file sizes: 111 shots at RAW. Granted, I could buy more cards but these little guys ain't cheap.

I'd looked at the Sony Mavica but it's huge! I figured if I was going to lug something that big around I might as well have the SLR.