Several people I know keep digital cameras on the medium JPEG quality setting, on the odd assumption that they might fill up the card and run out of space when they most need it. However, this rarely happens, and all they get is lower quality images.

It would be nice if cameras could start off by recording all images in the highest possible quality (or even RAW), and then, when the space gets low, offer an option to recompress the pictures to free up space.

Optional parts of the feature:

- no need to ask the user about recompression -- have a "variable compression" setting in addition to standard ones.

- camera could recompress just enough images to free up space for the next few shots -- no need to do it all at once.

- ability to mark best shots that will always be retained as high quality.

- for extreme space savings, possibility to resize the pictures as well.
-- danilom, Nov 29 2006

For that matter, if compression is always done "in the background," the camera could have a dumber CPU than it otherwise would need, and thus cost less... and perhaps also use less energy from the battery for compression.
-- goldbb, Mar 07 2012



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