The DiMAGE 7i has five different Image Quality/ compression modes: Economy, Standard, Fine, Super Fine, and CCD RAW. The camera is set by default to Standard. In Fine, Standard or Economy modes, the images are saved in a with a loss of information due to compression mode so the image quality may deteriorate. On the other hand in RAW and Super Fine mode, the image is saved via loss less compression method but the size will be large and the recording time will be longer than other modes. RAW is a Minolta unique image format so DiMAGE Viewer software supplied with the camera is necessary to open. Images saved in other four modes can be opened with general imaging applications.