How Digital Images Are Stored


by Jim King - Date: 2006-12-08 - Word Count: 436 Share This!

How do the pictures we shoot get stored in our digital cameras? They all go into a tiny little storage area - the memory card. Such a little area and yet, so many pictures can be held there till such time as we decide to transfer them onto a computer or print them on traditional film.

How exactly does this differ from the conventional storage of photographs? In the old cameras, the film captured the picture you took. Once the roll of film was over, you couldn't reuse it. You got it developed and then stored the prints. Now, a memory card can be used, erased and reused again and again. It's like a container - the moment it is full, you empty it out someplace else and it's ready to be filled up again. And these memory cards come in various sizes so you can choose how much storage you need at a time. When you choose the size, keep in mind the resolution of your camera, the compression rate and the format in which the pictures are going to be stored. Most pictures are stored as JPEG images which are compressed and are called a 'lossy' format. Some cameras store them in a form that is not compressed so this needs considerable more storage space. The place the images are transferred to is also storage. So you can store it on your hard disk, on removable hard drives, optical disks or even CDs.

Let's take a look at the various memory cards available. The one most widely used is the Compact Flash which you can buy almost anywhere and is very reasonably priced. It usually comes with most new cameras and comes in a choice: Type I and Type II. Find out which one you can put into your camera. Most of them have a 1 GB storage capacity. The very small compact cameras and MP3 players use a memory card called Secure Digital / Multimedia Card (SD/MMC). These are very small cards and do not have as much storage as the Compact Flash cards. Some of the Olympus and Fuji cameras have special, small memory cards that you can use only in their cameras. They can be used in other cameras if they have an adapter. They are called XD Picture Cards. Most Sony cameras use a Memory Stick. They can be used in their other devices as well. However, you can only use them in Sony products. You also get a Micro Drive which has a large storage capacity and is very inexpensive. It is housed in a Compact Flash casing and is actually a hard drive.


Related Tags: photography, digital images

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