 specifically with the intent of reducing the
  storage cost.
<DT><I>Codec</I>
<DD>Software that implements the decoding and encoding algorithms
  of a compression scheme.
</UL>

<P>
In order to better understand how TIFF works (and consequently this
software) it is important to recognize the distinction between the
physical organization of image data as it is stored in a TIFF and how
the data is interpreted and manipulated as pixels in an image.  TIFF
supports a wide variety of storage and data compression