Digital Cameras for Teachers
Taking Photos
Memory Card Requirements
When you were using your 35mm camera with a roll of 24 pictures, you always knew how many were left. But how to tell the number of pictures left on your 128 MB memory card?
Download the document "Megapixel Math" worksheet to see how many pictures fit on a memory card.
As with most digital camera answers, it depends upon a number of factors, including the amount of JPEG compression used by the camera and how much fine detail a camera will capture. Many high-end SLR-type cameras use uncompressed RAW or TIFF files, which can be extremely large. Most digital cameras default to JPEG compression, which makes smaller but high-quality files.
Most cameras will display how many pictures are left on the card at the current resolution or picture size. The LCD screen above shows that the Fuji Finepix 550 has 169 photos left (on a 256 MB card) at the 6MP photo setting using JPEG compression. Of course video will take more memory than still pictures.
Some cameras will stop at 30 seconds of video, while other cameras will allow you to fill the entire memory card. 300 dpi in the original image is an industry standard for maximum print quality. However, you can reduce that to 250 or even 200 and still produce good-quality photo prints.
Helpful information for digital imaging:
1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes 1 megabyte (MB) = 1,048,576 bytes, or 1024 kilobytes 72 pixels = 1 inch Web-based images: 72 pixels per inch Print images: 200+ dots per inchIn the table below, figures are approximate:
Card Size 1 Megapixel Camera 2 Megapixel Camera 3 Megapixel Camera 4 Megapixel Camera 5 Megapixel Camera 6 Megapixel Camera
Digital Cameras for Teachers
EOU Malheur County Center (541) 889-7468 or (541) 889-6222
