Ok, if I get this straight, you see that using a bitmap from a memory DC loads way faster than from hard disk, so you want to save the DC to disk?



Look at it this way: the DC does not take less memory than a bitmap does on disk, I don't know where you got that information. A DC loads a whole lot faster because it remains in memory. As we all know, memory can almost go with gigabytes per second nowadays, but hd's can't (at least not normal affordable hd's ), so that's why it loads slower from disk.

But, saving a DC to disk won't help, because than you would have to load it again, and it will still take you the same amount of time. You can compress them so it will take the load of the hd, but then it will take probably more time to decompress the image in memory, so you'll end up with the same problem after all... although ZLib provides a pretty fast decompression without data loss...