Non-specialist users of data compression often encounter difficulties with the selection of an algorithm, suited for their application. This report tries to facilitate this task by providing the necessary information about the algorithms. Four established, at the National Aerospace Laboratory available algorithms were selected for this study: - The Chaturvedi and Melzer algorithms - Straight-line approximation - Spline approximation with image segmentation. As a related goal, the relative performance of these algorithms has been investigated. Tests were done with Meteosat and Landsat Thematic Mapper images.