Your memory card is running low on memory

A common trick digital camera manufacturers love to do is to include a very small memory card with your digital camera. This helps keep the cost down which helps the manufacturer but doesn’t do you any good. For example, today I looked at a Canon PowerShot 6 Megapixel Digital Camera at a popular electronics reseller. The price? A fantastic $279.99. But hidden at the very bottom of the product details is a small mention that the camera comes with a 16 MB memory card. For those of you that like math, you could take about five pictures at a 6 megapixel resolution before you’d run out of room on your memory card.

The solution? A bigger memory card of course. Something the digital camera manufacturers count on you not figuring out until you’ve already purchased the camera. So what size is optimal? It really depends on how many pictures you need to be able to store before you have to download the pictures to your computer to free up the space on the memory card. The longer you want to go before downloading your pictures, the bigger the memory card.

I personally use a 1 GB memory card that I purchased for around $50. With this memory card I can take approximately 336 pictures at a 6 megapixel resolution or approximately 528 pictures if I lower the resolution to 4 megapixels.

Want to learn more about what resolutions are ideal and what memory card is best for you? Check out Noobie’s Digital Camera for Beginners Workshop below.

There’s even a drawing for a free 1 GB memory card given away at each workshop!