Digital memory cards are a camera’s equivalent of a computer’s floppy disk except they are static chips with no moving parts. Most digital cameras merely have a small amount of internal memory, what is known as RAM on a computer, and this internal memory is really only for emergencies, because often it will just hold three to six photographs at the highest quality that the camera can produce. IOn the other hand, it may hold 50-100 low quality photos.

When you are choosing a memory card for your digital camera bear in mind that not all makes of cards, frequently called flash memory cards or flash cards, will fit into all cameras. If you do not know which one you require, tell the shop assistant the make and model of your digital camera.

When you have the correct sort of memory card for your digital camera you may start considering size. However, there are one or two things that we ought to run through first. to help you comprehend why size is important.

A digital picture is made up of dots of colour known as pixels. The more pixels there are per square inch, the better the quality will be the picture. In other words, the picture will have a higher resolution.

Another thing about these pixels is that some of them can record one of merely a couple of thousand colours at a time and others can record one of millions, which makes for more accurate shades and tints – truer colours.

However, this higher ability to record true colours comes at a price because every pixel has to have a larger amount of RAM allocated to it – one byte will permit 256 colours; two bytes will permit 65,536 colours; three bytes 16,777,215 ; four bytes 4,294,967,296.

These byte sizes are normally expressed in their bit sizes (eight bits is the equivalent of 8 bits), so you have 8-bits, 16 bits, 24 bits and 32 bits. To place this into a perspective that might be more familiar to most people, Windows 7 comes in two versions 32-bit and 64-bit.

However, all these bits take up space, so the higher the resolution you require for your photographs and the truer you would like the colours to be, the larger the room you will require per photo. So, how good do you want your photos to be? Well, one question to pose to yourself is: what do I want to use the photographs for?

If you only would like to email them to your friends a lower resolution is better because it will send faster, but if you would like to print them out onto paper then a high resolution is better, particularly if you want large prints. The larger the print, the higher the resolution the better.

So now you know how good you would like your photographs to be because you know what you are going to use them for, so the last question to answer is: how many photos do you expect to take? The solution to this usually relies on what you are doing.

If you are going on holiday, say a cruise calling in at five different ports, you might like to take five flash cards of 256 MB or larger and use one for every port. If you are going to one location, a card of 1 GB might be sufficient, but you could always take two or three.. If you are going to a wedding, you may want 3, 4 or even 5 GB of memory, because you might like to print the photos out

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on lots of topics, but is at present concerned with cameras for beginning photographers. If you have an interest in photography, please go over to our website now at Photography Studio Cameras