Hi,

I'm doing a project where I will be shooting a lot of black & white 4x5 sheet film & working digitally. It seems like a good way to work would be to make contact sheets of everything, and scan the ones that look good. I want pretty huge scans (~100M pixels?), and I'm worried that I might run out of space. What file formats to people who have done this kind of thing use? I probably want to stay away from lossy compression like JPEG, and I also might want to stay in 16-bit grayscale. I'm assuming 16-bit grayscale makes your files twice as big, is this worth it?

Obviously you can't see a difference on the computer monitor between 16 and 8 bit (since every graphics card I know of does 8 bits/channel) but is it important for the final output, be it inkjet, lightjet, whatever?

Also, what is a good file type to use? I'm going to be working in photoshop CS; are PSD files compressed in any way? The only choices there seem to be when working with 16 bits/channel are TIF, PSD, RAW and PNG. When you go to 8 bits / channel, there are approx. 1.7 zillion file types.

Any advice or tips from people who have experience with this would be great.

Thanks!

-Tadge