I have to say that our visit to the world of the digital camera has been pretty amazing. The response we've gotten from our readers has been just astounding. In this issue, we're going to look at some important concepts of image compression that you'll need to know in order to understand how to capture and save images at the best quality.

But first, I want to comment further about the reader response. Based on your letters, it looks like we're going to spin out a digital camera publication, most likely to be called "Connected Photographer." We've long been thinking about doing a series of publications on the creative arts, but our plans were quite some distance out in the future. Given your interest, we decided to kick things off much more quickly and give Connected Photographer a go.

That said, to make this puppy launch, we're going to need your help. I'm going to continue to write articles about the cameras and photography, but I definitely need other voices. If you'd like to contribute to the new magazine, please let me know at david@ZATZ.com. We have general writer guidelines at http://www.authorpower.com, but aren't yet near having a Web site in place for the new magazine. Likewise, if you know of sites who might like to link to us, or companies who might make excellent sponsors (especially if you're at one of those companies), please let us know as well.

Now, on to the wonderful, wacky world of compression.

Everything we've talked about so far has led to the inescapable conclusion that "megapixels" is all about the size of the image, in digital form. The as-yet-undiscussed secret is that an image, when captured on a digital camera, is nothing more than a file, like what you'd find on your computer. Most cameras capture in TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) format, while a few others capture in JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) format.

The meaning of lossy
In general, you'll want to make sure your camera can save its image files as TIFF, because JPEG is "lossy." No, not lousy. Lossy. Lossy is actually quite good. Sometimes.

Let me explain. Quite literally, a lossy algorithm, whether we're talking about pictures or music, is one where the computer (whether on your desktop or inside your camera) is told to purposely lose some bits. I'll bet some of you are lossy right now, because you're feeling like your bits are lost. Don't worry, this is a pretty easy concept once explained.

When we digitize an image or a song, we're converting a non-digital medium (technically "analog") into a digital medium, a series of bits, or ones and zeros. When an image or sound is digitized at the highest level, the computer (through a series of digitizing peripherals) tries to capture as accurate a representation of the medium as possible. So a photograph, at the highest resolution, attempts to capture as much pixel data as possible. A song, when digitized, attempts to capture every nuance and tone of the music.