In single-pixel imaging or computational ghost imaging, the measurement matrix has a great impact on the performance of the imaging system, because it involves modulation of the optical signal and image reconstruction. The measurement matrix reported in the existing literatures is first binarized and then loaded onto the digital micro-mirror device (DMD) for optical modulation, that is, each pixel can only be modulated into on-off states. In this paper, we propose a digital grayscale modulation method for more efficient compressive sampling. On the basis of this, we demonstrate a single photon compressive imaging system. A control and counting circuit, based on field-programmable gate array (FPGA), is developed to control DMD to conduct digital grayscale modulation and count single-photon pulse output from the photomultiplier tube (PMT) simultaneously. The experimental results show that the imaging reconstruction quality can be improved by increasing the sparsity ratio properly and compressive sampling ratio (SR) of these gray-scale matrices. However, when the compressive SR and sparsity ratio are increased appropriately to a certain value, the reconstruction quality is usually saturated, and the imaging reconstruction quality of the digital grayscale modulation is better than that of binary modulation.