Digital Camera - Image Data Storage

Image Data Storage

Many camera phones and most separate digital cameras use memory cards having flash memory to store image data. The majority of cards for separate cameras are SD format; many are CompactFlash and the other formats are rare. In January 2012, a faster XQD card format was announced.

Digital cameras have computers inside, hence have internal memory, and many cameras can use some of this internal memory for a limited capacity for pictures that can be transferred to or from the card or through the camera's connections.

A few cameras use some other form of removable storage such as Microdrives (very small hard disk drives), CD single (185 MB), and 3.5" floppy disks. Other unusual formats include:

  • Onboard flash memory — Cheap cameras and cameras secondary to the device's main use (such as a camera phone)
  • PC Card hard drives — early professional cameras (discontinued)
  • Thermal printer — known only in one model of camera that printed images immediately rather than storing
  • Mini CD (left)

  • Microdrive (CF-II)

  • USB flash drive

  • 3.5" floppy disks

Most manufacturers of digital cameras do not provide drivers and software to allow their cameras to work with Linux or other free software. Still, many cameras use the standard USB storage protocol, and are thus easily usable. Other cameras are supported by the gPhoto project.

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Famous quotes containing the words image, data and/or storage:

    No man hath any quarrel to me. My remembrance is very free and clear from any image of offence done to any man.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    This city is neither a jungle nor the moon.... In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints.
    Susan Sontag (b. 1933)

    Many of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to me extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)