Digital Camera Memory Cards For Canon, Fuji, Sony, Nikon, Kodak Cameras

An Introduction to Digital Camera Flash Memory Cards

Digital memory for cameras, or flash memory, is an electronic means of storing the images you take with your camera. And anyone familiar with this kind of memory knows you can take and store more photographs with one of these memory cards than you could even with several rolls of film. Many common memory-carrying devices use flash memory cards nowadays, including cell phones, PDAs, MP3 Players, and other personal electronic equipment. The front panels of newer computer systems or laptops now feature different sized sockets corresponding to the four types of flash memory card form factors discussed in brief below, making data transfer from card to computer convenient. And as an added advantage to the memory card, if you don’t like a photo, delete it. Film in the older cameras could only be used once. Camera memory cards basically amount to reusable film. This single factor alone has endeared the memory card to many long closeted shutterbugs.

Memory Cards For Digital Cameras Are Flash Memory Flash memory is RAM—unplugged. Literally. Well, not quite. Traditional computer RAM loses all data when your computer is turned off. You save your work to a hard-drive or diskette, and when you turn it off, RAM is purged. Another term used often in technical circles in reference to RAM is "volatile".

Flash memory (non-volatile memory) is designed to hold on to data without a flow of current. Its physical difference from RAM is the way the transistors are designed with a special gate for storing a value(electrical charge) even when there is no power source. Yet when plugged in to its applications, it is erased from or written to electrically. This aspect of flash memory is why it is sometimes called a flash "drive", and also partly the reason why, as with a hard drive, you can recover "lost" data, or deleted files, or as in the case of your camera memory, your pictures.

The typical camera memory card will meet the capacity needs of most users. In its compactness and simple appearance, this style of flash memory has reasonable flexibility. With the exception of amateur and pro photographers seeking creative control over factors such as shutter speed, exposure, aperture, zoom and continuous photo modes, the typical SD flash memory card, for example, has a range of applicability and capacity which should be adequate for those wanting only family snapshots on the summer vacation. That is not to say however that the SD memory card standard has not been extended to include these other advanced uses.

As stated before, unless the user needs higher capacity or higher speeds for particular uses, most memory cards will suffice. If you want to take a lot of photos, make sure you have a camera memory card with a high enough capacity, or double up on your next purchase. Among these special considerations are the size of the photos you want to take, since cameras do allow you to switch between differing sizes for your pictures, and today's flash memory cards typically meet the capacity requirements. "Pixel" is a shortened way of saying the two words "picture" and "element". As you know, the more pixels, or "picture elements", the more space you'll use per picture on the camera's memory card. The popular buy is SD or SDHC. The higher capacity memory card format or SDHC, is ranked in speeds up to class 6 (fast, and there is a class 2 and class 4). An even faster card is now available with write speeds of 30MB/sec, and it has been dubbed SDXC, for "extended capacity", since you'll find storage on these cards up to 64GB. For those needing to know the different types of camera memory cards available, here are the four main memory form factors that have emerged as the most popular—CompactFlash, Secure Digital(SD), xD-Picture card and Memory Stick by Sony.

CompactFlash SanDisk is responsible for the CompactFlash format at 43x36mm. An older format, it’s losing favor in compact cameras due to its size. However, in spite of its bulk or probably because of it, more expensive and versatile DSLR cameras still use it. And it is still generally the cheapest flash memory card or drive available along with successor SD.

The CompactFlash standard is evolving. Recent improvements (standards Revision 5.0 this year) to this form factor include an upgrade to mandatory 48-bit addressing and therefore a higher theoretical memory card capacity for CompactFlash drives, taking it beyond the theoretical 137GB current standard to 144PB. Improved Performance Control, related to the performance quality of the card, and improved card design, will make for better compatibility for broader and more advanced uses. Not only is CompactFlash the standard memory card for DSLR cameras, yearly improvements by the standards organization maintain and enhance its suitability for video and other advanced uses.

SecureDigital Panasonic, SanDisk and Toshiba corporations founded the SD industry standard flash memory cards with encryption to combat the threat of piracy. Already smaller than the CompactFlash format, SD (24x32x2.1mm) comes in two smaller sized formats, miniSD, similarly sized at 21.5mm, and microSD (11x15mm). The SD standard allowed for capacities of 2GB, but a larger capacity standard evolved from it, called SDHC(High Capacity), making room for 32GB. Older “SD” cameras don’t necessarily support the SDHC standard with its higher capacities—flash memory card buyers looking for SD or SDHC camera memory cards are savvy to keep this in mind for a short while. The SD format currently offers the fastest and most popular of the flash memory standards, since it's used in phones, mp3 players and PDAs, as well as for memory cards in digital cameras. As stated earlier, this standard is versatile, and like CompactFlash, is improving.

Sony Memory Stick Sony developed the Memory Stick. This memory card format was originally sized at 50x21.5x2.8mm, and only had enough space for about 85 6 megapixel images. The capacities of this memory card have since been increased to compete with the other formats, and its successor, the Memory Stick M2, is 15 x 12.5mm. The Memory Stick Duo is second of flash memory cards only to SD in speed, yet can cost as much as twice the comparable memory card capacity in the SD format.

xD Picture Card The 20 x 25mm xD memory card is perhaps the newest type of flash memory card for digital cameras but the slowest in speed, which suggests it is not ideal for those of us who like to shoot in rapid or continuous mode. Again, it is stressed that it should be more than adequate for normal photographic purposes, and has widespread use.

SecureDigital Camera Memory Cards and Compatibility Within the SD Standard  The advancements in the SD standard are backward compatible.  The more advanced host devices can use the older memory cards and even present memory cards.  SDXC host products, such as digital cameras or video cams, can accomodate SD, SDHC and SDXC memory cards. SDXC memory cards can only be used with SDXC host products. An SDHC flash memory card can be inserted into an SDXC or SDHC host, such as a Nikon DSLR Camera. As you might have guessed SDHC memory card host devices can use SD or SDHC flash memory cards.

How To Recover Deleted Photos on a Camera Memory Card File or photo recovery on a working flash memory card is often not a big deal. Being essentially a "disk drive" without the moving parts, a camera memory card stores data in much the same way the typical hard drive does--when you delete data, provided you haven't saved other data on top of it, your data is still there. When data is deleted it was more practical in terms of power consumption and time to erase the place marking the location of the file, or the address, and not the entire file. While flash memory cards have fundamental differences in how data is managed, in most normal cases data can be restored. Flash memory cards for digital cameras are no different.

If you've deleted a picture accidentally, simply take a deep breath and google some of the following search terms: data recovery, flash memory card data recovery, camera memory card data recovery, etc. If your camera doesn't come with an undelete option for you memory card, your computer tower or desk top unit will probably supply a plug-in location for the four different formats of flash memory cards on the front panel. There are also adapters available for fitting your card into different devices. For example, if your memory card is a miniSD or microSD card perhaps, there are adapters for these cards which will fit into your computer's front panel. Your data recovery software should be able to access this card as if it were any other drive on your computer system.