A picture is worth 1,000 words, and a museum-quality computer image is worth 12 million bytes. The trick for experts is to compress that computer information, so that it can squeeze onto your computer disk, zip through phone lines, breeze across the information superhighway or fit into your video telephone of tomorrow. Media can see state-of-the-art examples of this compression technology at 11 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 22, in Regency Ballroom, section C, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel at 1209 L St., Sacramento. Without compression technology, for example, high-density television (HDTV) would not be on the verge of replacing today's TV sets, says Ralph Algazi, founding director of the UC Davis Center for Image Processing and Integrated Computing. In another exhibit, Japanese companies DAI Nippon and NTT will show a sample art gallery and other very high-quality images and video on high-resolution computer screens. The exhibit is part of an international conference on picture coding, hosted by Algazi and the center.