Has anyone had any experience with digital cameras in Britain or Europe. i have a 256mg and a 64 mg card but seem to take hundreds of photos (the more you take, the more likely you are to get that 'good' photo). I am worried that all of my memory will soon be full! (I usually don't take them on the lowest quality).
I have now bought one of those portable USB memory sticks as well, so if I can get near a computer, I can download my photos onto it as well.
However, does anyone know how easy it is to be able to get the photos burnt onto a CD over there, so that I can keep reussing my memory sticks? The memory sticks are quite expensive to buy out here.
Would most photo shops burn the photos on to CD's? Likewise, does anyone know how much it would cost?
Thankyou!!!

What type of memory card does your camera use? If it's compact flash (CF), I'd suggest you buy a bigger card; prices have plummetted in the last year, and you can now get 512MB cards very very cheaply. A 512MB card will hold many hundreds of pictures and unless you're on an "extended" holiday will probably suffice you.

What I generally do is "snap away" during the day, and then in the evening, go through the pictures I've taken during the day, and delete the obviously poor ones. That way, you really shouldn't have space problems.

There are places you can get pictures burned to CD for you; eg in the UK there's a chain of photographic shops you'll find in every sizable town, called "Jessops", who offer that service. I believe they charge about �10 or so. You only have a limited amount of free time, however, so you may not have the time to avail yourself of the service.

If you want the ability to store pictures yourself without needing a computer, there are devices you can get which will do this for you - you simply put the memory card in the device, and it stores the pictures on a hard disk. For details of one such device which many people have good opinions of, see http://www.xs-drive.com. />
Personally though, as I say, I find that 512MB memory cards have really "solved" the storage problem. On my last tour, I took two such cards with me, and finished up with one card about 70% full, and the other unused. That included taking a fair few "video clips" too, which use up much more space than normal photographs.

Hope that's of some help to you,

Regards,

Chris

Last year we did the Best of Italy trip. We took 3 x 128mb compact flash cards (just in case!!) and used 2 1/2 of them. We didn't delete any photos while on our trip - just reviewed them each night. We then put them all on cd when we got home. 640 or so photos - not bad for 2 weeks!!

I use an x-drive to store photos while traveling. In March, I stored 850+ high density photos on the x-drive while traveling in Italy for 2 weeks; used more than 4+gigs on the x-drive to store the photos (I take a lot of photos, too).

5 days in Niagara Falls in June produced 400+ photos, all on the x-drive.

There are lots of portable storage devices out there besides the x-drive. Go to: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1023 />
for discussions on various forms of storage and media.

Glenn
pbase supporter
www.pbase.com/gsrunyan

While holidaying in Paris recently we found out that by the third day our digital camera was full. We marched off to the photo store.

The dealer agreed to print our photos on high-quality photographic paper and also provide a photo CD at the same time. That way, she said you have the colour prints for a photo album and digital images on CD.

Justimagine you could be left holding 1000 prints that would cost you at the rate of 4.50 euro for 24 prints.

We mentioned that would cause us a serious luggage problem. The sales girl said that the machine was set up to print and burn cd at the same time.

Luckily she pointed out a cyber cafe across the street from her store. So we managed to copy the pictures on cd (cybercafe clerk found a rewritable cd for us)and had to pay rent on the computer we used (4 euros an hour).

But keep in mind running around looking for a internet cafe in a crowded city takes time and effort.

I became selective about taking higher megapixel shots during the rest of the holiday.

Remember to take lots of pictures.

Tchazza, I have asked this same question recently and have come to the conclusion that a larger capacity card or just a couple of extra cards is the way to go. As Chris Marriott says, they have come way down in price and I also think his idea of deleting the dud photos at the end of each day is a good idea. I use Multi Media cards and they now retail for half the price I paid when I first bought my camera 12 months ago! I saved even more by buying a couple on ebay.

Several questions come to mind when dealing with digital images. Primarily; What are you going to use the images for when you get home?

There are several types of digital cameras on the market today, and they all take different sized images. If you're looking for a new camera, I personally wouldn't get anything less than 3 megapixels. If you intend on printing 4 x 6 images when you get home, you can get away with most of the 2 megapixel cameras, however if you're wanting to print something like an 8 x 10, you'll need at least 3 megapixels. Also, every camera has a bunch of image quality options that you can set before you take your picture and that will reflect on the number of photos you can save on your removable card...

Personally, I have a Canon A70 digital camera, and I set the image quality to the 1600 x 1200 size, and I use the "medium" sharpness setting. This is fine for a nice 5 x 7 print, and I can get about 450 images on my 256 Meg card. For most people, two 256 Meg cards would do. There are several places in the UK now that will burn the contents of your flash card to CD in about an hour.

Compare that to my SLR; I took 1200 photos with my SLR on my last 29 day trip... but then I take a lot of pictures, so I'd need about four 256 Meg cards or two 512 Meg cards, etc.

Bottom line though, you can't beat film for image quality. If you're just taking photos to send to relatives and such, then digital is fine, but if you intend on blowing those images up, then film is the best option.

Also, be careful recharging your digital camera batteries in those UK sockets! It might even be better just to buy disposables.

"Bottom line though, you can't beat film for image quality"

I think the bottom line has moved considerably in the last couple of years. I hate to sound like a canon salesman, but feel free to look at sample shots from Canon's EOS digital range.
e.g.
http://www.dpreview.com/gallery/canoneosd60_samples1/

Click on download original file (only if you have high speed internet!) Ask yourself if you need a camera capable of taking better photographs than these.

I've been using a D60 for nearly 18 months and am of the opinion that the camera & those that have been relesed since are far, far better than I am!

cheers.

>>Also, be careful recharging your digital camera batteries in those UK sockets!<<

I have never, ever encountered a digital camera whose charger was not "multi-standard" and would work equally well on European and US voltages!

Have you come across which might have a problem?

Regards,

Chris

Joseph,

I'm glad you like the Canon EOS D60. When the body only costs $1400, it had better produce good images. Since the lenses run $250 to $2500 EACH, the quality should be good.

FoxDesigns:

I think your dead wrong. I shot film for 25 years before coming to digital. The images are as good or better in digital. It is much easier to control contrast and saturation and to adjust for different light conditions. I will agree, however, that you never will get images with your digital camera as good as film as long as you set your image size and quality to "medium."

As a general principal, if you shoot every image at maximum size and maximum density, you will get your best image whether it is printed at 4 X 6, 5 X 7, 8 X 10 or larger.

I agree with Chris. No recharger made in the last five years will not handle different voltages. Don't believe what you see in the movies.

Glenn
pbase supporter
www.pbase.com/gsrunyan

Hi Glenn,

Thought you might be interested to know that I've finally "taken the plunge" and bought an XS-Drive (actually an XS-Drive 2) to store the pictures on my forthcoming tour in November. What made me do it was buying a new camera (a Minolta DImage A1), and finding that it'll store less than 100 full-size, best quality pictures on a 512MB CF card .

I'm very impressed with the XS-Drive from what little use I've made of it so far. Very easy to use, and very effective. I only bought the smallest 20GB version, because that'll be more than enough for my needs.

It was through your previous recommendations that I bought it, so thanks for that!

Regards,

Chris

Chris,

Use it in good health and enjoy.

Of course, if you have a problem, I never heard your name .

Those are big images-5 megs each! Are you shooting in RAW format rather than Jpeg?

Glenn

Hi Glenn,

No, that's JPEG!

At the maximum 2560x1920 image size the camera tells me that on my 512MB card I can get:

65 images as RAW.
33 images as uncompressed TIFF (!)
96 images as "extra fine" JPEG
180 images as "fine" JPEG
288 images as "standard" JPEG

So now I've got the XS-Drive I'm planning to use the extra fine JPEG as my standard format.

My philosophy has always been to take pictures in the best available quality (well, OK, not TIFF - that's taking things a bit far ), and the drive now makes that very easy to do. If you want smaller files later, you can always re-sample the images to reduce the resolution, or increase the JPEG compression factor to compress them more, but there's no way to get more quality if it's not there to begin with!

I've only had the new camera for a week, so I'm still getting used to it. Thus far, though, I'm very impressed! One _very_ neat feature the camera has is "image stabilisation" (like many video cameras have) to allow you to take longer exposures hand-held. They claim that with it, you can take exposures as long as, perhaps, 1/10th sec with no blurring. Very useful for shooting indoors with no flash.

I plan to go out this weekend on a "shooting session" so I can make sure I'm thoroughly familiar with the camera before I go away on holiday with it.

Regards,

Chris

Chris

The math here doesn't work right. 1920 X 2560 is 4.9, call it 5 megapixels. That should be 102 RAW images-TIFF adds more stuff.

On our 707's, fine Jpeg is a 50% cut-that would be 200 images on your 512meg card.

Are you sure these numbers are right?

Glenn

Well I still have to argue the point that you can't get as good an image with a digital camera as you can with a film camera. You can get a very very good image if you have a professional model camera in say the 10 megapixel range (although the Canon D10 at 6.3 megapixels is very very good too, it's on my list of "Next Toy To Buy"), but you can't get the same colour tone/quality that you get with film. I work in the Graphics industry, I design scholastic textbooks for a living, and we do use a lot of digital images these days, but for something like a cover we still use a shot image on film.

To get back to the topic though, most people don't need that kind of high-quality image. For the most part, I don't need an 8x10 image set to high quality, I'm only printing off 4x6's and "medium" quality is fine for that. If I decide I really want to use an image in my work, then I have the option to ramp up the quality.

As for recharging batteries; The UK runs on a higher voltage system, and I've found that many North American battery chargers get excessively hot when they're recharging. I've seen several people blow their video camera recharger in a UK socket... Just be careful with your chargers.