CompuServe Messages

I'm working on a database application using Superbase for Windows (I'm in the home stretch, have just forked out for the developer's edition and they tell me they're no longer updating the program .. thought this only happened in Amigaland). But I digress … this database has scanned images in it, 72dpi to appear on screen and hopefully a higher resolution bitmap of each product to appear in a catalog run off on a laser printer. But if we go to 150 or 300dpi on the version for the catalog, we're going to need huge amounts of hard drive space just to put these image files. I'm wondering if there is anything I can do through Imagemaster to compress them. Superbase doesn't support JPEG, but it does support TIFF and GIF. I took a 500K 160dpi TIFF file, saved it as a JPEG file in IM then saved that resulting file as a TIFF and it ended up about 300K. Is this reasonable logic or am I attempting something completely foolish here? I know JPEG is a lossy compression, but since these pix are only going to appear at about 1.5 square inches, I figure I can live with that. I have no idea what happens to the data if it is compressed, then saved as a TIF. I haven't printed them out to check, everything looked fine on the screen, but IM was converting everything to AGA 256 anyway. (BTW, they are B&W scans). Can anyone point me in the right direction here, or should I tell the client to buy a big hard drive? Thanks, Barbara