>>
THIS SHOULD NOT BE THE CASE, IF YOU ARE GETTING DISTORTIONS THEN YOU HAVE A
BUM COMPRESSION PROGRAM.
<<

That's right Britt. LZW may have had some implementation issues from
differing vendors. But the compression itself is considered "lossless",
meaning that what goes in comes out.

BTW I understand that LZW works by mapping out redundant pixels (ie. all
the white ones, black ones, etc) rather than altering any individual
pixels. Certainly any jpeg style artifacts are the result of poor
programing or worse. The above should point out why LZW is not consistant
with the resulting file size. Files with line work will benefit the most,
while images with lots of complex details may not reduce much at all.

Frank