This paper presents the findings of a study conducted to compare the effects of WSQ and JPEG 2000 compression on 500 ppi fingerprint imagery at a typical operational compression rate of 0.55 bpp (bits per pixel), corresponding to an effective compression ratio of approximately 15:1. Compression effects are measured using peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), the proportion of pixels changed via compression regardless of magnitude, and the Spectral Image Validation/Verification (SIVV) metric, a frequency analytic method. The study also examines comparative behavior of the two compression algorithms with respect to multiple compression cycles, recompression of images using dissimilar CODECs, and compression fidelity error as a function of compression bit rate.