|
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
|
