I thought that I would add my two cents in (albeit a bit late) about scanning chips. As most of you know, I have been scanning chips for over three years. I have had a few chip scans put in the Prodigy File Library, as well as a few here on Greg's Cyber Guide. I use Photoshop Ver 4.0.1, along with an HP ScanJet IIcx flat bed scanner. (I use other graphic packages too...)
I have come to the realization that several things effect the quality of the scanned image. So when I scan chips, I actually scan a chip twice. Once at 100 dpi, approx 1 : 1 depending on the monitor one is using to view the chips on, and the second scan is at 360 dpi.
The later scan is useful for two reasons. First to see the fine details of the chip, and second my printer is a Epson Color Stylus and prints in either 360 or 720 dpi. For images being printed in the 720 dpi mode, the file should be at 1/2 or 360 dpi for the best quality.
I tried to do only one scan of the chip, i.e. at 360 dpi, and then resample the images down to 100 dpi and was not satisified with the quality of the resultant image. I put an example up on one of my web pages to illustrate what I mean. The resultant image is not as sharpe - yes applying the sharpen filter does help, yet the image is still not as clear as an original scan.

Additionally, saving scans in any format other than TIFF, the resultant image is also degraded - the degree of which is determined by the format and the "quality factor" used for each format. I save mine in jpg with a quality factor of 8, so the file sizes for the 100 dpi scans are 10k to 28k, and the 360 dpi scans are 90k to 220k, depending on the number of different colors used in the chips.

One last comment about scans. I do take the time to "hand" orient each scan rather than using the rotate function - as this too has an effect on the quality of the resultant image. Even with the hand allignment of the scans, I can still scan 12 chips in 15 minutes (yes that is actually 24 scanned images, one in 360 dpi and the second in 100 dpi). Not too bad...

I know that the steps I go through are a bit much - yet since I'm a prefectionist, I take the additional steps to make the quality of the images I scan to be the best they can be.

The bottom line is each person that scans chips needs to decide what the scans are for and how they are going to use them.
I am documenting my collection by having scans on a CD (Yes I wrote my first CD with scans on them back in Oct. '97) as well as being able to produce a high quality hard copy printouts.

Just my two cents...