Enough Memory

[WillCAD]

I am REALLY new to the digital world, so this may sound like a dumb question. When we bought my Canon S2 at Circuit City, the guy there told us not to take our 2G card (that we had just purchased) to Wal-Mart, Wal-greens, CVS etc. to have them print pictures because their machines would fry the card! He said the card would read that there were images, but you'd never be able to retrieve them, so he recommended downloading images to a CD at home and then taking CD to Walgreen's to print pics. Would Walgreens actually be able to download to a CD without ruining my card, is this guy crazy? We will not have a laptop at WDW and this is our first trip, so I don't want to lose my pictures!

The guy is crazy.

Any time someone else has posession of your memory card, there is the posibility that they might lose it or damage it due to negligence, but that certainly doesn't happen all the time. Maybe it happened to that guy once, but if you went into Circuit City and got hit by a car in the parking lot, would you then tell all your friends to never visit any Circuit City ever again because everybody gets hit by cars in their parking lots?

The normal download procedure does not actually do anything to the memory card; it simply copies the image files from it to burn them on CD, much like copying a video tape. The images are still on the card at that point. After checking the CD to make sure that all of the images copied properly, you clear the card in your own camera by formatting.

It is a wise precaution to download your pics to CD at home before taking them someplace for printing, just in case the printing place loses them, but when you are at WDW and don't have that option, it is perfectly safe to get your pics downloaded to CD. You're probably not going to get them printed at WDW anyway; you're downloading them to CD so that you will be able to clear your memory card to take more pictures.

I recommend putting the CDs away in your hotel safe after getting them burned. Wait until you get home, make a copy of the CDs, and get all of your pics printed at once. Printing them all at once might qualify you for cheaper print pricing, and waiting till you get home will allow you to make a copy of the pics on CD instead of sending the original CD out to the printing place, keeping the originals safe.

 

[whogirl'smom]

Thank you so much willCAD for being so clear and simple in your answer. I think this is the first photography post I've actually understood !! Anyway, you've relieved a major worry I had, so now I'm off to practice with my new camera!

 

[WillCAD]

Thank you so much willCAD for being so clear and simple in your answer. I think this is the first photography post I've actually understood !! Anyway, you've relieved a major worry I had, so now I'm off to practice with my new camera!

That's probably because I'm not a real photographer, I'm just a computer geek who likes to take pictures.

 

[Jilly16]

Is there something similar to the SmartDisk Photobank that's not as expensive. I just bought a $400 camera and don't think I can spend another $150 (trying to save money for 1st trip to Disney).

 

[Groucho]

In this thread, Extreme8 linked to a device he has that is basically the same, just add your own hard drive. $34 plus the cost of a laptop hard drive.

Honestly, you're much better off buying more memory cards. They are far more reliable, they're smaller, and they're less fiddly that carrying another device with you. For what you're doing (vacation photos), they'll probably be cheaper, too.

 

[Jeninpa]

Okay..............I thought I was good to go on memory cards since I have a total of (1) 1GB, (5) 512MB & (1) 128MB cards BUT now after reading how much memory you guys took I want to go buy more cards!!! I take ALOT of pictures just on a daily basis so I imagine I can really use up the memory cards on a 9 day vacation (7 day cruise)! Heading to amazon.com right now to buy me some more cheap sd cards!!! Thanks!

 

[allyn]

check techbargains.com for hot deals on memory cards...