Digital Camera Memory

Digital Cameras use memory cards, or equivalent, to store pictures as information, and the memory card is the digital equivalent of film. If you have a camera with an internal memory, it will alert you when the memory is full and need a new card. The camera will have come with a connecting cable by which photos are transferred to your computer via a USB or other compatible port. Many models of digital camera save photos onto flash or media cards or diskettes. You remove the card or diskette and insert it into your disk drive. The type of memory card you use varies with digital camera brand and model. The most popular formats are: SmartMedia, CompactFlash, Sony Memory Stick, MultiMedia Card (MMC), Secure Digital (SD) and PictureCard Images are usually saved in jpeg format which compresses the image so that it can take up less memory and processing power. Jpeg does cause the images to degrade with use so it’s a good idea to save an original image on a CD and edit and display duplicate copies. You can choose to save images as uncompressed tiff files on many good cameras but tiffs take up a much larger amount of space

on the card. Memory cards come in various sizes and the size dictates the number of photos they will hold. Your camera will most likely come with an 8 or 16 MB digital camera memory card or stick, but this is usually not enough for the average consumer, especially if you are traveling, and you can buy additional memory. (this is probably why they come with insufficient memory) If you are in a major center you will be able to take your memory card or memory stick into a photo lab and have the photos transferred to a CD. But, if you are going to be out of range you may want to buy additional memory so that you do not to use up your digital camera's memory card before you finish the trip.