The standard approach for preprocessing spotted microarray data is to subtract the local background intensity from the spot foreground intensity, to perform a log2 transformation and to normalize the data with a global median or a lowess normalization. Although well motivated, standard approaches for background correction and for transformation have been widely criticized because they produce high variance at low intensities. Whereas various alternatives to the standard background correction methods and to log2 transformation were proposed, impacts of both successive preprocessing steps were not compared in an objective way.