By Jakob Jelling
As it is a fact that digital cameras are comprised of miniature computers that have storage discs for retrieving the images as digital information, so a certain amount of knowledge is necessary regarding the digital camera disc formats. A proper understanding of the disc formats of the digital camera memory can help the photographer or user make efficient use of the device in a correct and useful fashion. This discussion is aimed at revealing these little details.
At present in among the common users of digital cameras there are two main types of storage medium available nowadays. Some cameras use 1.44-MB floppy disks, which are available almost everywhere in the present market trends, and some digital cameras use assorted forms of flash memory having a range of capacities covering from several megabytes to a gigabyte. The difference lies between these two types of disc formats in their capacity. Floppy disks have a fixed memory capacity that cannot be altered, and the flash memory devices have capacities that keep increasing everyday. This is a kind of boon because of the fact that picture-sizes are also increasing constantly with the invention of higher resolution cameras that become available in the markets with daily technical advancements.
The major and the most popular file format available for digital cameras are TIFF and JPEG formats respectively. Looking in a little detail into these two formats, the TIFF format is an uncompressed format without any alteration of image sizes and JPEG is a compressed format that does alter the image size for economic use of memory for storage. Certainly, from common sense, majority of the digital cameras use the JPEG file format for storing images and photographs, and they even offer quality settings such as medium or high and accordingly the size is altered thus providing both memory management as well as quality management of the pictures.
Again looking at the disc formats from a different angle, it is apparent that a 1.44-MB disk cannot clutch many photographs or images. Sometimes, in fact, they can't even fit one picture on one disk, due to high quality and subsequent seize and memory requirements. However, the floppy disks have their own advantages. In today's world of Internet publishing and email a picture size larger than 640x480 is hardly required, and more or less always they are saved in JPEG formats. During such times it is possible to accommodate about 15 pictures on every disk. Thus making situations more economic and flexible for the users. However for storing bigger and greater quality pictures higher capacity media are required such as a 128-MB flash memory card that can store more than 1,500 small compressed images or 20 of the uncompressed 1600x1200 images.
Thus so far a handsome amount of information regarding the disc formats has come into light from the above discussion. It is a humble effort to bring out the rudimentary knowledge for such a wide field of study as digital camera disc formats, which includes photography as well as computers all in one. What a fantastic combination!
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