Digital Camera Memory Cards

Digital memory cards are a camera's equivalent of a computer's floppy drive except they are static chips with no moving parts. Most digital cameras just have a small amount of internal memory, what is known as RAM on a computer, and this internal memory is really just for emergencies, because often it will just hold three to six photos 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 keep in mind that not all makes of cards, frequently known as flash memory cards or flash cards, will fit into all cameras. If you cannot remember which one you need, tell the shop assistant the make and model of your digital camera.

Once you have the right type of memory card for your digital camera you can start thinking about size. However, there are one or two items that we ought to run through first. to help you comprehend why size is important.

A digital picture is made up of dots of colour known as pixels. The more pixels there are per square inch, the better the quality will be the photo. In other words, the picture will have a higher resolution.

Another thing about these pixels is that some of them can record one of merely a couple of thousand colours at a time and others can 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 is the equivalent of 8 bits), so you have 8-bits, 16 bits, 24 bits and 32 bits. To place this into a context that might be more familiar to most people, Windows 7 comes in two versions 32-bit and 64-bit.

However, all these bits take up space, so the higher the resolution you need for your photographs and the truer you want the colours to be, the larger the space you will require per image. So, how good do you want your photos to be? Well, one question to ask of yourself is: what do I want to use the photos 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, especially if you would like bigger 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 photographs do you want to take? The solution to this normally relies on what you are doing.

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

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on numerous topics, but is at existing concerned with cameras for beginning photographers. If you have an interest in photography, please go over to our website now at Photography Studio Cameras