To provide a digital still camera and an image pickup method which improve the instaneousness of photographing and optimize an image.

An image is temporarily stored in buffer memory 2 from a CCD 12 by operating a release switch 24. The image stored in the memory 2 is written in a secondary storage medium 9 by operating switches 26 to 30 watching a processing state on a monitor 20, selecting a parameter of image processing to select a compression system and performing working through an image processing circuit 4, a compressing circuit 8 and a CPU 11 on the selected condition.