Does the In-Memory Quality Matter?

The major consideration when deciding which of the four settings of the DC-120 for the internal image quality to use is: what will be the final use for the photos and how much will they be scaled before publishing.

Here is a table showing 33% reductions of photos taken at all four different quality levels, compressed to a JPEG that has 50% quality retention factor. They all have been taken under mid-morning sun at 8.6 inches distance from the subject. Enlargements of the middle portions of the stem can be seen elsewhere. Even at 33% reduction, the photos are still about 150% of the actual size (assuming your monitor has resolution of 72 pixels per inch). The images are about 16 kB each.

Note: to view this page, you really need a monitor capable of displaying thousands of colors, and a 24-bit color setting is is highly recommended.

My conclusion: the medium quality is just fine for most purposes.

Low quality. This fits 20 photos in memory. The photo is slightly fuzzy compared to its neighbor.	Medium quality. This fits 12 photos in the memory. The sharpness is barely lower than on the photos below.
High quality, fits 7 photos in memory. I am hardly pressed to see much difference compared to the medium quality (above right).	Lossless - OK, so it is somewhat smoother and sharper than the others, but not that much to justify running with the camera back to the computer after every two photos.