commented courteously ...

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 have a 5700, which was $700 retail. To give me an idea
what you have, is your 3200 a $400 camera or a $100
camera? If it is like my wife's $150 Kodak, she can only
change resolution, and cannot control JPEG compression
(which Kodak has set way too high, so the pictures have
artifacts despite their 3 mega pixel size!)

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%.

JPEG compression is not a percentage. Rather, it is an
arbitrary 1-100 scale. Are you saying that your images
look like a JPEG 50? If so, the quality must suck on quite
a few of them. I see lots of artifacts on my wife's
Kodak's and I'd judge the compression at around 25-30.

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?

Little P & S cameras do not have any JPEG controls
generally, ala my wife's Kodak. I'm not sure where the
price point is where you see "basic", "normal", and
"fine" (none have an actual compression number that I know
of) but I'd imagine its around $300-400.

Nikon's "better" cameras have all sorts of controls over
the image. The D70 is a fairly high-priced camera and may
well be overkill for you. If you like Nikon, look around
the web for a 5700. They've been out-of-production for six
months but stores still have them, and Nikon pops for a
$150 mail rebate. It's a very fine camera, I can
personally attest to that (except for flash).

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

NEF is Nikon's proprietary RAW. It is in *no* way a
Windoze BMP, which is nothing more than an uncompressed
bitmap file (hence its name)! RAW/NEF give you total
control over the picture parameters even after you've
taken the shot. I don't use NEF with my 5700 because I
don't think I need it, but lots of people think that
NEF/RAW is essential to their work.

There's plenty of folks on this NG that are much
knowledgeable than I am about this stuff, so you'd help
everyone lock onto what you need to do if you give some
details on price and purpose.

Good luck, and Happy New Year!

--
ATM, aka Jerry Rivers