Sd Cards For Digital Cameras
Once you know about the type of cards that are supported by your digital camera, the next thing you should consider is the storage capacity suitable for you. It is better if you calculate your requirements and choose appropriate SD card within your budget. Else, you will run out of space on your memory card in the middle of a photo shoot. The latest digital cameras are capable of taking pictures in a variety of formats (RAW, AVI, JPEG etc) and resolutions (640x480 to 3648x2736). When you multiply number of formats with the range of resolutions, you get many combinations at which you can capture images or video. You need to have some idea regarding the resulting file sizes for various combinations. Lower resolution pictures result in smaller file sizes. RAW images produce larger files than JPEG files. For example, a 3648x2736 image at full 10 MP resolution results in approximately a 15 MB file in RAW format, 30 MB in BMP format and 2.2 MB in JPEG format. Please note that these values may vary for different digital cameras. When the same digital camera is dialed down to take a 2048x1536 image (3.1 mega-pixels), it produces a 4.7 MB RAW file or 9.4 MB in BMP format or 1 MB in JPEG format.When you are about to capture video you have to consider frame rate in addition to resolution and format. Videos captured at 30 fps (frames per second) are double in size compared to videos shot at 15 fps. Video formats include motion JPG, AVI and RAW. You may also capture audio along with video. For full information about video capturing capabilities of your digital camera, refer to its manual. When calculating SD card size required, take into account how many pictures you usually take at a time in which format and resolution. If you are planning a video, try to determine approximate length of the video, frame rate and resolution. For your reference a 2GB SD memory card can store 20-40 minutes of video ( based on mode ) or 770 photos at 3648x2736 ( 10 MP ) resolution or 34 hours of MP3 music at 128 Kbps. A 4 GB SD Memory card holds just double of that. Again, these figures may vary for different digital cameras.
Whatever is your requirement, whether it a video or photos, remember you can always use several smaller capacity SD cards and just change them when they are full. It does not take much time switch memory cards, so do not panic if you do not have a large memory card. It may be a good practice if you use separate SD memory cards for separate formats. Then you can estimate how many more photos you can store in the remaining space.