Is image column content in SQL Server binary or text encoded?

When I do a select on an image column in SQL Server 2005, I see something like "0xFFD8FFE..." and I know a gif file is binary and starts with GIF89a...

So does SQL Server enco开发者_如何学编程de the column for display in Management Studio?

In C#, is the content saved using a byte array?

No, this is hex representation of bytes array (basically 0x00 always indicates HEX format)

Regarding image column type:

image Variable-length binary data from 0 through 2^31-1 (2,147,483,647) bytes.