Digital Camera Memory Cards

Digital cameras have revolutionized the art of photography.  Twenty years ago, developing a roll of film usually meant hours spent in a dimly lit dark room filled with tubs of chemicals.  Today, digital cameras use small memory cards in lieu of film to store pictures.  Developing your own pictures nowadays involves taking a memory card out of your digital camera and placing it in your computer's digital card reader slot - a process that takes about ten seconds.

Think of memory cards as small computer hard drives for your camera.  With standard film cameras, when the shutter opens the light reflected into the lens is burned into the film.  Digital cameras, on the other hand, grab the information seen through the lens and transform that data into a series of 1s and 0s that can be interpreted as a visual image by a computer.  This information is nothing more than a file that is then saved onto the digital camera's memory card, where it resides until the user moves or deletes the image file.  

There are a number of memory card formats for digital camera cards on the market today with variable storage capacity for each.  Secure Digital (SD) is one of the most popular formats because of its small size and is usually interchangeable with the MultiMedia Card (MMC) format.  The SD storage capacity ranges from 32MB up to a maximum of 4GB.  Obviously, the higher the memory rating, the more pictures that are able to be stored on the card.  Even in a mid-range card, it's possible to store over a hundred images before having to delete or move photos.

Other popular memory card formats include CompactFlash cards (CF), Sony's proprietary Memory Stick cards, and xD-Picture Cards.  A new memory card format on the market is the Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC) card, which boasts a capacity of up to 32GB.  

Another important aspect for digital camera memory cards is called the speed rating.  Denoted with a number followed by an 'X' (133X, 60X, etc.), this rating basically describes how long the camera will take before it's ready to snap another picture.  A higher number means the camera is able to transfer the data more quickly to the memory card, allowing the capture of more pictures in a given time frame.


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