Digital Memory

Digital  memory is an essential and often overlooked piece of digital photography equipment. There are many types of memory and it's a good idea to consider what type of memory a camera uses before you buy your first digital camera. It's also important to make sure you have enough memory before you take pictures of an important event or leave for vacation. Although memory cards are reusable, they don't have a limitless capacity and it's always good to have more than you actually need.

Most digital cameras come with very low capacity memory cards. If you're shopping for your first digital camera make sure to budget for an additional card. It's a safe bet that the card that comes with your camera is woefully inadequate. And as camera megapixel counts grow, higher capacity memory cards become necessary. I started out with two 64 meg cards and now I have two 1 gigabyte and three 256 megabyte cards.

Most camera manufacturers publish tables on their Web sites to show how many images you can save on their included memory card. There is no fixed rule for the number of photos you can put on one card because different image file types, different amounts of compression, and image content all affect the size of each file. But the manufacturer's site is a good place to start when you decide how much memory you want. As a general rule, I'd recommend at least a 256 megabyte or two 128 megabyte cards if you're buying a 3-5 megapixel compact digital camera. If you want to shoot lots of high resolution TIFF or RAW files, then you'll probably want to look at 512 megabyte and 1 gigabyte cards. It's also a good idea to not save all of your photos on one card. There's always the possibility that cards can get corrupted, lost, or stolen. Using more than one and switching during a shoot protects your valuable photographic data.

Now that you know a little more about memory cards, you can start thinking about what to buy. The links to the left briefly describe the most common types of digital camera memory. There are also a few useful, memory-related accessories listed. When you've figured out what you need, you can use the "Browse and Buy" links at the bottom of each description to see a list of what you can buy through this site.

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