Effects of large field cutoffs in scalar and gauge models

We discuss the notion of a large field cutoff for lattice gauge models with compact groups. We propose and compare gauge invariant and gauge dependent (in the Landau gauge) criteria to sort the configurations into ``large-field'' and ``small-field'' configurations. We show that the correlations between volume average of field size indicators and the behavior of the tail of the distribution are very different in the gauge and scalar cases. We show that the effect of discarding the large field configurations on the plaquette average is very different above, below and near beta=5.6 for a pure SU(3) LGT.