Dear experts,

I'm very familiar with 35mm photography, but new to digital.

One thing I do know about photo editing is how you can
control the compression on the the jpeg. The more
compression, the more loss, and vice versa.

Yesterday, I bought a Nikon 3200 and a one gig memory card.
The manual says that the compression is set indirectly in
the image mode. When I set it to the highest 3 megapixel
setting, it uses about a 1:4 compression ratio. The next
3M setting uses a 1:8 compression ratio.

I set it to the highest quality image and took a few pictures
with the camera and uploaded them. They all seemed to have
their jpeg compression set to 50%.

In Windows, the 773 kb jpeg file, when saved again as
..jpg at 100%: 1305 kb
..bmp 9217 kb.


Are there point and shoot cameras where you can control
the amount of jpg compression? Which cameras allow you to
do this? How about on the D70?

I've also heard of Raw. Nikon stores these as .NEF.
Is this the same as a .BMP file on Windows?


Thanks