Abstract: The present invention provides a recording/reproduction apparatus and a method therefor with superior cost-effectiveness and data durability with respect to vibrations, and an efficient configuration of the memory for storing data for recording/reproduction processing when compressing image data or the like and recording the data to a recording medium or reproducing the data therefrom. In the present invention, the memory for compression and expansion processing and the buffer memory for recording and reproduction are allocated to the same memory chip. When recording/reproduction becomes impossible because of vibrations or the like, the capacity of the buffer memory for recording/reproduction is maximized by expansion. The memory capacity for compression/expansion processing is modified according to the required image quality.