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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!
By Jakob Jelling
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