Memory for your Digital Camera

A Memory Card does a lot more than just store photos. It can store fast and help process better.

A new camera has all the different kinds of memory cards you can buy. Memory cards don’t just vary in terms of the amount of data they can store. They all have different data transfer speeds. Faster Memory cards help the camera for better photography. 

It all depends on the kind of photography involved. For example, most of the action involved in "sequence photographs" require camera speeds close to three frames per second to capture all of the shots that go into creating the sequence. If you think about it, that’s a lot of pictures to transfer from the camera to the memory card within a fairly short period of time. In a situation like that, having a high speed memory card is very important.

Here is a brief rundown of how your camera stores pictures. Whenever you press the shutter button down, a door opens up and your image sensor is exposed to the light from outside. Once this light hits the sensor, it is converted into a file that is sent to your camera’s image storage buffer.

A buffer is kind of like a temporary memory. It’s a temporary storage space between the image sensor and the memory card. The buffer is always moving images to the memory card as fast the memory card will allow it to. Most cameras take pictures faster than the image buffer can move them. When this happens, the buffer fills up, and the camera stops taking pictures until enough images have been transferred from the buffer to the memory card for the camera to take more shots.

A faster memory card helps to empty out the buffer quicker so you can continue to take pictures for a longer period of time. Not only is this great for taking sequence pictures, it’s great when you want to capture an elusive subject or an important sporting event. You can continue to hold the shutter down to take as many pictures as you need, never having to worry about the camera stopping you in your tracks.

It is the same with video camera, only difference being that the transfer sizes are exponential.

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