Mr. Sid air photos

I have Mr. Sid photos that are on the order of 2.4 MB in size. When I insert them into ACADMAP2004, things slow down a lot. (IF I turn the photo layer off, it acts as though the photo is not there.) I have trouble plotting with the image turned on. I have tried image clip and that helps if there is one photo. But it does not help with two. This is even a problem with a new 2.4Ghz computer with plenty of RAM. I thought I could convert to Tiffs, but I learned Tiffs are uncompressed whereas SIDS are compressed, so a tiff would be larger. Any ideas?

SIDs??? Those are new to me. Honestly TIFFs are not bad. They might be larger but it might also handle them better. I am just not that familiar with Map usage. What about CALs format?

i dont know either who is this sid but one thing's for sure. try not to use TIFF for referencing. try to use JPG instead. TIFF are an awesome format but they are mainly lossles and they hold an alpha channel ( transparency). This is more a extension use in print/graphism.

It is a file mainly for use with mapping. MrSID is an acronym for Multi-resolution Seamless Image Database.

MrSID is a powerful wavelet based image compressor, viewer and file format for massive raster images that enables instantaneous viewing and manipulation of images locally and over networks while maintaining maximum image quality. Features include unprecedented compression ratios while maintaining highest image quality, true multiple resolutions, selective decompression, seamless mosaicking and browsing.

What are your computer specs? If you work with these files a lot you may need to get the best computer you can afford with a top quality graphics card and as much RAM as it will take.

Mr sid files are great, ECW files are too, but i cant get them in to max.

i have heard of a product called wavegen texture loader that can do it but i havent used it personally, i would like to hear if anyone has.

sorry i didn’t completely read the first post, my first response is useless to you. Large sids and ecw file are hard to plot in standard AutoCAD. First make sure you have all the recent updates to AutoCAD there have been several. Also if you are using a sid file, I assume you have either civil 3d, raster design or map 3d. Make sure you load into one of these apps. Plain AutoCAD can open sid files using the object enabler, but it is much slower and less efferent the image engine that is used on the vertical applications like civil 3d are 100x better.

One other reason for problems printing can be the size of the cash on the printer. You can plot to a pdf on your local drive to get around this issue. Hope this helps