PURPOSE: To obtain an economical system at a low cost, without necessitating a backup battery by using an EEPROM for a memory card without affecting the speed of a consecutive photographing due to the speed of the writing in a memory card even at the time of the consecutive photographing.

CONSTITUTION: A picture signal indicating a picture picked up by a CCD 10, is transmitted through an amplifier 14, and an A/D conversion circuit 16 to a signal processing circuit 18. The picture signal is operated for an interpolating processing or the like by the signal processing circuit 18, operated for a compressing processing by a compression-encoding circuit 20, and stored in a buffer 22. Until then, the processing is operated in a real time. A memory card controller 26 reads out data from the buffer 22, and stores the data in a memory card 24 using the EEPROM at an appropriate writing speed of the memory card 24.