Continuous burst mode digital camera

A camera has a continuous full-resolution burst mode wherein a sequence of full-resolution images is captured, is image processed by a pipeline of dedicated hardware image processing engines, is zoomed by a zoom engine, is compressed by a compression engine, and is stored into nonvolatile storage as a sequence of discrete files. The capturing of images and the storing of files continues at a rate of at least three frames per second until the user indicates burst mode operation is to stop or until nonvolatile storage becomes filled. Although the camera has a buffer memory into which raw sensor data is placed before image processing, the number of images that can be captured in a single burst is not limited by the size of the buffer memory. The cost of a consumer market camera having continuous burst mode capability is therefore reduced by reducing the required amount of buffer memory.