I believe it is essential to shoot at the highest quality possible, as one can always reduce the size of your files for viewing or printing (for printing you only need 280dpi and for viewing 72dpi), but you if you do not originally have all the detail, you can never get it. As a result, I only shoot in RAW format, which gives me many options, i.e. to set my white balance afterwards and to make exposure corrections. On a 128Mb card I will only get 19 photos. I use portable hard drives (40Gb), which I think work better than CD burners and on my last tour used approximately 13Gb of space.

Koot

Joseph,

Sorry for the lateness of the reply, I've been a little busy of late.

Apologies if I was a little bit unclear in that statement. The compression that I was referring to mainly assists the Write Speed in the Digital SLR cameras. They compress and buffer the data to improve speed when writing to the card. This becomes more vital when you are writing 8 to 10 Megapixel photos in quick succession as these can be 5+ MB each.

The more pertinent problem for those who don't have the high-end Digital SLR's appears to be the file mamangement capabilities of the camera when there are a large number of files on the card.

From my experience, most cameras build a directory list of all the files on the card when they start up, and every time you take another photo, the directory information is updated. Hence, if you have a large capacity card to store a lot of 3 to 5 Megapixel photos, there is a decline in speed when accessing the directory as it becomes larger.

So if you are not using a new Digital SLR camera, the buffering and compression is a bit of a non-issue. The number of files on the card will be what slows your camera down. If you have a 3 Megapixel camera, I would recommend that you don't get a card with more than 512MB, as the number of files will start to slow the camera down.

This information is based mainly on my experience as digital photography is a hobby of mine. I'm by no means an expert.

I hope this has helped to clarify the situation a little further.

- Foghorn

quote:

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Originally posted by joeseph:
<If your digital camera doesn't provide a new compression standard (which is usually only found in the high-end cameras), a large capacity card ( > 512MB) will slow down the read and write speeds. As the card fills up, you will notice severe degredation in performance when you turn the camera on, and when you take a photo.>

Foghorn,
I haven't heard this before, what sort of compression are we looking for?

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Thanks Foghorn - I learn something new every day!
cheers.

I just got into the tips - CHRIS you are so smart - did anyone have any luck making CD copies while touring? How about the enterprise of making for others and charging ? Worth a try. Barb