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"What exactly do you mean by resolution ?"

Well... what I specifically did not mean was simple pixel count.

What I meant was that the TIF image contained the most uncompressed original image data. The original TIF right out of the camera was 9,327 KB of information. Saving to to the JPEG format uses some very lossy compression algorithms; actual data is lost during the conversion and compression, data can that never be recovered.

You can see at least some of this if you take a JPEG and try to convert it back to TIF. Rather than ending up with an image that is 9,327 KB in size, you come in somewhat smaller... 8.594 KB. And not only have you forever lost roughly 8% of the original information in the process, the new TIF will retain many of the JPEG artifacts caused by compression (and that were originally misinterpreted by "Polarik" as signs of forgery on the Obama COLB).

The TIFF Image provided by Punkster last Friday is the highest quality image ever shared on the Internet. It possesses more uncompressed original data than any other such image, and it possesses none of the JPEG artifacts seen on the previously released images showing it cannot have been "backwards engineered" from one of them.