You NEED the relevant Microsoft documentation to make sense of BMP files because there are several dozens of BMP file formats. Decoding this on a micro is probably not a good idea. The bytes you saw at the start are a header and one or more color tables represented in one of several formats. Check the PPM (binary) and PGM formats for an easier format. Also the format used by the WAP protocol for sending images. Peter -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.