How does my digital camera turn my picture into a file?

How does my digital camera turn my picture into a file?

Mark Comon (Vice President, Paul's Photo, Torrance, CA) gives expert video advice on: How does my digital camera turn my picture into a file?; How do various types of memory cards differ?; How much memory do I need for my digital camera? and more...

With digital camera photo files, when you take a picture in a digital camera it's not a picture, its data, it's ones and zeros, binary information. The camera chip inside the digital camera takes the life; the world that we see converts it to electronic information. Then the computer in the digital camera assembles that into a picture. We call that the jpeg file. The jpeg file in your camera can be saved either as a large file, a medium size file, or a small size file, this is called image compression. So, we want to set the camera to do jpegs, but we want to take the biggest file size that we can, or the least compression, or fine jpeg, because this would give us the best picture quality.