Which digital file format is 'best'?

[nathanm]

In the Luminous Landscape Lightroom tutorial video Jeff Schewe mentions that even Photoshop folk say that TIFF is most archival format because the code is publically documented whereas PSD is proprietary. Of course, there's probably other concerns besides file format in regards to being able to open legacy files in years to come.

PSD is nice but TIFFs are more generic you can placed layered TIFFs into Quark without a plugin. Well, that may have changed in v7, can't remember.

[Kirk Gittings]

Many of my clients want only tiff for whatever reasons and the rest accept it.Tiff serves my purposes too, so archiving in Tiff allows me to simply on one archived format.

[Joseph O'Neil]

I use TIF for my best too, but just to be anal retentive here, the most lossless file format is FITS. URL here explaining it:
http://heasarc.nasa.gov/docs/heasarc/fits.html

[David Luttmann]

Tif only....except when using my cooled CCD cams on the telescope....then it's Fits as mentioned above.

[jetcode]

there is nothing more lossless then uncompressed data - fits is not better the tiff in that regard and most likely another proprietary raw format

[Dave Parker]

.tif here as well