Sunday 1 January 2012

Memory Cards For Digital Cameras

By Owen Jones


Digital memory cards are a camera's equivalent of a computer's floppy disk except they are static chips with no moving parts. Most digital cameras merely have a small amount of internal memory, what is known as RAM on a computer, and this internal memory is really only for emergencies, because often it will just hold three to six photographs at the highest quality that the camera can produce. IOn the other hand, it may hold 50-100 low quality photos.

When you are choosing a memory card for your digital camera bear in mind that not all makes of cards, often known as flash memory cards or flash cards, will fit into all cameras. If you cannot know which one you require, tell the shop assistant the make and model of your digital camera.

When you have the right sort of memory card for your digital camera you may start considering size. However, there are one or two items that we should run through first. to help you realize why size is important.

A digital photograph is made up of points of colour called pixels. The more pixels there are per square inch, the better the quality will be the photograph. In other words, the image will have a higher resolution.

Another thing about these pixels is that some of them can record one of only a few thousand colours at a time and others are able to record one of millions, which makes for more accurate shades and tints - truer colours.

However, this higher capacity to record true colours comes at a price because each pixel has to have a larger amount of RAM allocated to it - one byte will permit 256 colours; two bytes will allow 65,536 colours; three bytes 16,777,215 ; four bytes 4,294,967,296.

These byte sizes are usually expressed in their bit sizes (eight bits equals 8 bits), so you have 8-bits, 16 bits, 24 bits and 32 bits. To place this into a context that may be more familiar to most individuals, Windows 7 comes in two versions 32-bit and 64-bit.

However, all these bits take up space, so the higher the resolution you require for your photos and the truer you want the colours to be, the larger the space you will require per photograph. So, how good do you want your photographs to be? Well, one question to pose to yourself is: what do I want to use the photographs for?

If you merely would like to email them to your friends a lower resolution is better because it will send faster, but if you would like to print them out onto paper then a high resolution is better, particularly if you want large prints. The larger the print, the higher the resolution the better.

So now you know how good you would like your photographs to be because you know what you are going to use them for, so the last question to answer is: how many photos do you want to take? The solution to this usually depends on what you are doing.

If you are going on holiday, say a cruise putting in at five different ports, you might want to take five flash cards of 256 MB or larger and use one for each port. If you are going to one location, a card of 1 GB may be sufficient, but you can always take two or three.. If you are going to a wedding, you may like 3, 4 or even 5 GB of memory, because you may want to print the photographs out




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