"RST Engineering" wrote in message
...
There was a comment on the "was" thread about .jpg being an inferior
format to a couple of other formats. So if my Kodak 1.3Mp camera only
downloads in .jpg, how do I fool it into downloading in some other
uncompressed format?

Depends on the camera. But I wouldn't be surprised if a 1.3Mp camera simply
does not provide any other format. Kodak's original digital cameras had a
proprietary format option, but it was compressed as well, and any
proprietary format requires conversion software to change the data into
something you can actually use. (EXIF is simply a header format used with
JPEG images to allow the camera to store information about how the picture
was taken...it's not an image format itself).

For a consumer-grade camera, as long as you set the JPEG format to the
highest resolution, lowest-compression setting, you should fine. You'd be
unlikely to notice any difference between the raw image and the compressed
one. Any of the professional-grade digital SLRs should have an option for
saving the data in a "raw" format (which typically is actually just a
proprietary, non-lossy compressed format). One of Canon's higher-end models
actually can have two memory cards installed and allows you to save each
picture twice, JPEG to one memory card and their raw format in the other.

All that said, you don't seem to have correctly understood the comments in
the other thread. JPEG is NOT an inferior format for photographs. It's
designed to remove information (enhancing compressability), without
sacrificing what the human eye sees. At higher compression levels, it
certainly can look like crap, but at the low compression levels used by
digital cameras, it's just fine for most people and most purposes.

The comparison you read was specifically looking at computer-generated
line-art images, which JPEG compression can make unreadable, especially at
the higher compression settings. But that doesn't mean JPEG is inherently a
bad format. It just means that you can achieve similar compression ratios
without sacrificing quality by using a non-lossy format like GIF or PNG
(computer generated images have more "regular" data, and so compress better
without throwing away information...they are "information sparse" in the
first place).

Suggestions other than borrowing Gail's very expensive Canon for my
magazine shots?

Well, 1.8Mp sure sucks for publication, but it wouldn't take a high-priced
camera to fix that. There are several good 5Mp cameras on the market,
priced at $500 and lower, that would do a great job. They emit JPEG images
too, but they will be high enough resolution, and low enough compression
that they should reprint just fine.

Pete




According to the camera specifications, the actual file format is listed
as: "Exif version 2.1 (JPEG base).


Jim