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You Cannot View TIFF Images Using Windows Picture and Fax Viewer

Article ID: 329270 - View products that this article applies to.

This article was previously published under Q329270

SYMPTOMS

If you use Windows Picture and Fax Viewer in Windows XP, you may experience the following problems:

When you open a multiple-page Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) file, only the first page is displayed correctly. The rest of the pages display as black squares.
When you open a TIFF image, the image appears faded and it is unreadable.

If you use Windows 2000 Kodak Image Viewer, you can view these files as expected. Additionally, if you convert these TIFF files to a different compression format by using Windows 2000 Kodak Image Viewer, and then view these files using Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, you can view the files as expected.

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CAUSE

Windows Picture and Fax Viewer in Windows XP uses Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI+). GDI+ supports many standard compression algorithms for faxes. However, it may be incompatible with some of the encoding schemes that are not used frequently.

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RESOLUTION

To resolve this problem, disable the PackBit encoding in the software that created the fax. Alternatively, convert these documents to a different format.

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