Additional Storage for Your Digital Camera

When planning the budget for your new digital camera, include the cost of an extra memory card. The cards that come with your camera aren't nearly enough memory to take the number of pictures you would like to take, so get a bigger card right off the bat.

A 3-megapixel camera should have at least a 256 MB card; a 4-megapixel camera needs at a minimum a 512 MB card. Any camera with 6 or more megapixels should have a 1 GB card. This will eliminate the possibility of ever missing a shot because your memory card is full, or even worse, having to choose which photo to delete because you have found one more that you just have to take!

Being able to shoot at your camera's highest resolution is another important reason to have a massive memory card. Spending money on a 6-megapixel digicam should also include shooting with all 6 megapixels!

Another thing to remember is to shoot at the camera's highest compression setting, too. Squeezing more images onto your memory card by shooting at a lower resolution and with lower quality compression settings will only cause regret later. You never know when you will shoot the next great photo. (Do you think the photographer left home that morning knowing he would photograph the nurse kissing the soldier? That photo turned out to be the most well-recognized photo taken at the end of the war!)

Don't chance missing a great shot with poor quality. Another thing to remember is that the lower the resolution of your photos, the smaller the print will have to be to remain clear. No posters can be made with a 640 x 480 resolution. Not exactly what you will want to display at your first gallery showing!

Storage on Digital Cameras

The higher-end professional cameras may have microdrives; these are hard drives that are built in the form of a compact flash. With the use of an adapter, you can use SD cards in a compact flash device. Digital cameras may use a memory card or a flash memory card, which are solid-state electronic storage devices.

In October 1998, Sony introduced the removable flash memory card called the Memory Stick; this term is used to describe the entire family of memory sticks. While the original stored up to 128 MB of data, an 8 GB card is now available that holds two 128 MB banks. There is also a card specifically designed for high-definition stills and video cameras called the Memory Stick Pro-HG.

This form of storage has outlived all other types of digital storage devices, and it isn't known if this is due to the manufacturers continued support of the device, or because of the technology it contains as a storage format.

Gradually taking the place of the memory stick is the flash memory card SD/MMC. Originally they were limited to 2 GB of storage, but are now being replaced with 4 GB cards. A revision was made to the SD standard, which means that all cameras don't recognize the larger storage capacity of the 4 GB cards.

In addition, these cards are formatted in the FAT32 file format, and the older digital cameras use FAT16 format, which contains a 2 GB limit. Camera phones use a MiniSD Card, which is about half the size of the standard memory cards used by digital cameras.

Also available in camera phones is the MicroSD Card, which is about ¼ the size of those in digital cameras. An even smaller format was the XD-Picture Card developed in 2002. Smart Media, containing 128 MB of memory, at one time competed with the Compact Flash; it is now obsolete and was replaced by the xD picture card.