A recent thread on the MSA list server about problems with image formats (in this case TIF or TIFF) showed, that there is a bit of confusion in the microscopy community about the best file format for digital images. I will try to shed a bit of light onto this problem.

Digital images are at the core a large array of numbers. One number per pixel for b/w images, 3 numbers per pixel for color images. The simplest file format consists of 2 numbers that define the width and height of the image, and then just a listing of numbers for each pixel. By using the right conventions, the image can be recreated from a data file like mis. In essence, this is the format of a bitmap image (BMP), and other formats derived from it.