Digital Photo Storage

The kind of storage your digital dream camera uses will never be a factor in making your selection (unless it's a truly odious choice, and that's a matter of personal taste). The days of the digital cameras that used floppy disks and other oddball media are long gone. Today, all digital cameras use one (or more) of the following options:

• Secure Digital (SD): Among non-SLR cameras, the SD format is by far the most popular memory card format. These postage-stamp-size cards, which allow manufacturers to design smaller cameras, are available in roughly the same capacities as CompactFlash, and cost about the same. The chief drawback (to date) is that no mini hard drives exist in the SD format. If you want to use a mini hard drive, you need a camera with a CompactFlash slot. Some digital cameras can also use the similar (but slower) MultiMediaCard (MMC).

• CompactFlash (CF): CompactFlash is the second-most-favored format in the United States. Although physically larger than SD, CompactFlash cards are still very small and convenient to carry and use. As larger capacities are introduced, they usually appear in CF format first. As a bonus, the CompactFlash slot can also be used for mini hard drives, such as those from IBM, with capacities of a gigabyte or more. They are the most popular memory card format for digital SLRs.

• xD and mini-xD: The xD and mini-xD formats are new, smaller than Secure Digital, and supported by fewer vendors. Although it's wise to avoid getting stuck using a Betamax format when everyone else has converted to VHS, you're safe in choosing a camera using an xD variant. The vendors are important enough that even if the format eventually fails, you should be able to purchase memory cards for as long as your camera works. Indeed, because memory cards are typically used over and over forever, the cards you purchase with your camera or shortly thereafter are likely to serve you throughout your camera's useful life.

• Sony Memory Stick: About the size of a stick of gum, Sony's Memory Sticks are useful because you can also use them with other devices, such as MP3 players. They're not going to replace CompactFlash, though. Sony has had an unfortunate tendency to flip around among memory choices for its digital camera, and didn't stop when the Memory Stick was introduced. It's now available in Memory Stick (up to 128MB sizes), Memory Stick Pro (larger capacities), Memory Stick Duo (a smaller version that needs an adapter to fit memory card readers outfitted for Memory Sticks), and most recently, Memory Stick Pro Duo (in capacities up to 4GB). Whew!

• Mini hard drives: For a long time, mini hard drives were your only option when you needed more than a gigabyte of storage. If you're using a 6-megapixel or better camera and like to save your images as TIFF files or in another lossless format, you need more than a gigabyte of storage. However, with CompactFlash cards now available in 4–8GB sizes, the mini hard drive is losing its capacity edge, and it has always cost more than the equivalent silicon memory card. Although not excessively prone to failure, mini hard drives do have moving parts and must be handled with more care than memory cards.

• CD-R/RW: Sony, in its never-ending quest to change its digital camera media options annually, actually tried out both floppy disks and mini CD-R and CD-RW discs for its digital cameras. Although not really a bad idea, because the media is relatively inexpensive (a 240MB mini CD-R is a lot cheaper than a 256MB CompactFlash card), this option never caught on because digital camera memory requirements eventually exceeded the capacity of mini CDs. Sony seems to have settled into an ever-changing Memory Stick groove now.

Digital memory cards might be offered in various speeds, such as standard, high-speed, 40X, Ultra, and Extreme, depending on the nomenclature used by the vendor. The faster, more expensive media are able to store images more quickly. Unless you're shooting sequences and don't want to wait even a short time between pictures, standard media will probably do the job for you. Some newer digital cameras that provide a high-speed burst-photo mode require these higher-performance digital cards to function as advertised, however. With memory cards now being offered in 133X and 150X speeds, there's no telling where the speed race will end.