Will this be enough memory (digital) for our trip?

[Jillpie]

We are digital camera newbies and bought an Olympus Camedia C-4000. I used it for the first time last week and after getting used to how the buttons all work, I really am liking it.

We went to Costco to look at more memory, as this camera only came with 16 meg card. This camera does not take the 256 card, only 128's. So we bought two of these at 35.00 a piece. I put it in the camera and at the medium setting, it'll take 130 pictures. So that'll be 260 pics all together. Plus I'll have the 16 card as an extra. We're going to DW in January for 10 days. I usually take approx. 150 or so pics on each vacation with my 35 mm., but being a total new digital taker, do you think that'll be enough memory?

The last thing I want to happen is what happened to that poor Dis poster that lost all her pics to a CD that was empty when she got home. But I think I have enough, yes?

 

[Dan Murphy]

LOL, I am the wrong guy to ask, Jill.

You will most assuredly take more pictures with the digital. Do you have a laptop?

 

[geffric]

Look at the number of pictures that it takes on the highest setting and figure that is the number of photos per card.. IMHO you need another 128 .. you don't want to have to buy one at WDW for 2x the Costco price

 

[Poohnatic]

Congratulations on going digital.

You'll want more memory!!! Trust me, digital totally changes the way you take pictures. I've had my SLR for 25 years, and I'd easily go through about 10-12 rolls in a week at WDW. With the digital, I have taken 400 pictures on a 9 day trip in February (supplemented by the other two cameras-another 6 rolls), I went for 4 days in June and shot another 250 or so pictures, one day in July and I shot about 50 pictures and a 5 days in August where I shot about 300.

The digital will give you so much more freedom that you'll take pictures when you were worried that you would waste film in the past. Plus, there are so many settings, that you can now take night time fireworks pictures without them turning out blurry and nighttime portraits (the flash works great on this). You can also take indoor, no flash picures that come out! You'll see right away whether a shot came out and can delete the bad ones. My son loves looking for Hidden Mickeys and we can now take pictures inside the attractions of them (spaceship earth and Norway, for instance)

I love IllumiNations and I now have digital from 5 different shows. I have the music in constant play in the car, so I end up synching up the shots really well. The first time I used the fireworks setting on my camera, it took a half dozen shots to realize the shutter stays open for 3 seconds. I actually like some of the blurry Fantasy in the Sky pictures for showing the way I learned on the fly!
Your camera may vary, but I think that's how most brands handle this feature.

Double check that you're using the resolution you want often. On the first trip, I inadvertently switched to 2.0 mp and didn't get too many shots on that card. My DH was really sweet and found me a laptop on ebay after we returned, so we now can dump down a card if we need to, but I found a deal at Costco over the summer for the 256 compact flash cards and got 2 cards for 60 bucks. I'm still using the 256 that I started using the first week of september and we have not been shy about taking pictures...the camera goes with me everywhere since it's so small.

Another nice thing about Costco is that you can print out your digital pictures for .19 a print. I also got my Christmas cards there, printed off a digital picture taken at Hersheypark's Candylane the weekend before last. Online, there's Ofoto, Snapfish and Walmart sites that you can upload and family can choose prints.

Enjoy your trip and TAKE LOTS OF PICTURES!

Suzanne

 

[battricia]

just make sure to take LOTS of batteries, if your camera takes the disposable kind. My sister kept running out of batteries when we went, but luckily we brought tons so we were OK. Digital cameras seem to run out of batteries much much faster than regular cameras.. Even if you have rechargables, you might need 2 or even 3 sets per day, and you don't want to waste your time running back to the room to charge the batteries, there's way too much FUN to be had!! have a great time!

tricia

 

[Tuffcookie]

When I go for 1 week I take 3 128 cards plus the 16 I got with the camera when I bought it.

TC

 

[epcotfan]

My camera is a Fuji Finepix 2800 and it is 2 mega pixels. I take 1 128mb card. I generally use my camera on the VGA settings which allows for 640 X 480 shots. I end up getting about 1000 pics using this method. The rechargeable batteries also last longer as well. I normally get about 200 photos per battery charge. When I use a higher setting the batteries wear out really fast. Since I publish most of my pics to the web I prefer this setting the best because of their smaller file size.

 

[clutter]

Poohnatic,

Can you just take your memory card to Costco and have them print them???

I tried snapfish, and it took 10 minutes to upload just 5 pics. Even though I'm dial-up, it's usually pretty fast, so I don't think any of the online services are going to work. I don't have five hours to upload!

I downloaded my pics, cropped a few of them. My cd burner isn't working, so I thought I'd just upload them back to the memory card and take them somewhere to get get them printed out. Does that sound like a good plan??

tia

 

[nativetxn]

I always take 3-128 meg memory sticks <i>and</i> my laptop for downloading.

 

[Poohnatic]

Yes, just bring the card to costco. Mine's compact flash, they've got a slot for that and smart media. The other, smaller cards they have an adaptor for, but the photo tech will give you the adaptor and instruct you in how to put the card in.

I've also done photos at WalMart and CVS, but they're more expensive. I haven't played with the Costco for cropping, but WalMart's is easy to use...they charge .29 a print.

I'm just waiting for one of these places to take several cards and burn them all onto one CD. The home pc is the one with the burner, but all the prints are in the laptop!

Suzanne

 

[Towncrier]

I find myself taking at least 100 pictures a day during my trips to WDW. Sometimes a lot more than that. If you don't have a laptop/notebook computer or some other place to offload photos from your camera, you may find yourself having to cull out the bad photos in order to make room for new photos as you near the end of your vacation. That happened to me on my first trip to WDW with my digital camera. I had enough memory to take 350 photos and ran out of memory after only 5 days.

When we used to use our 35mm film camera, we usually took 150 pictures during a 2 week vacation. We take 10 times that many photos with digital. It seems a waste to buy enough memory to cover a 10 day vacation, but if you don't have a laptop computer, you may not have any other choice. Of course, your mileage may vary.

 

[bunnyfoo]

No matter how much memory I take, it never seems to be enough ... I scrapbook, so I want pictures of everything

 

[lazarru]

We went last Dec and took between 80 and 100 pictures per day over a 8 day vacation. Basically every night we were downloading to the laptop.

 

[raidermatt]

As others have said, you are likely to take more pictures than you did in the past, for two reasons:

1- More convenience with digital.
2- Its your new "toy".

A few suggestions/notes:

I prefer to use the highest resolution setting, because when I do get that awesome shot, I want to have the quality there to be able to get larger photos if I choose. If you do that, plan accordingly.

One of the plusses with digital is you can manage your photos at the end of the day. You can snap off several shots of the same subject using different zooms, or different angles. Then, either immediately, or at the end of the day, you can delete those you don't want to keep. If you do that, you can save some space.

Remember that each picture does not take up the same amount of space. A nightime shot or indoor shot will usually take up less space than a daytime shot taken outside, due to their being less color/detail. So keep that in mind when guessing how many pics a 128 card will hold.

I didn't realize some cameras won't take a 256 card (I'm not an expert either, so I guess that's not that surprising). Are you sure about that?

So, all that said, I would err on the side of having too much memory instead of being caught with not having enough.

 

[luv2nascar]

I could take 100 picture of the castle alone
buy another memory card

 

[Jillpie]

Thank you to everyone. I've been on this board for about 2 years now and it never fails to amaze me what an invaluable resource it is.
Dan, believe it or not, as you know my DH is a Sr. programmer analyst and we don't own an up to date laptop. We really have no use for one as we just got a new home computer 2 years ago and he does all his work at work.
It sounds like the consensus is to get another card. I can't see myself taking more than almost 300 pictures, but if you'all say so! I guess it can't hurt to have another one on hand, just in case. At 35.00 a piece, its pretty painless.
All of your info was great. Thanks again!!
Oh, I do have a question for you as I just started using my camera. Do you use the screen in the back more than your viewfinder? I found that in dark settings (such as in the evening in a darker room, taking pics of my son and all of his friends going to the semi last Sat. night), I couldn't see a thing on the screen! But stressing out about taking the pic and not really knowing the camera yet, I didn't know to look in the viewfinder to really see what I was looking at. Duh. The other thing I noticed was in the sunshine...you can't really see what you are taking pictures of through the back screen either. Am I missing something here, should I be doing something other than the obvious and just look through the viewfinder instead?

 

[Dan Murphy]

I use both the LCD and the viewfinder, but it is about 90/10 for me, I MUCH prefer the screen. Enjoy, Jill.

 

[bunnyfoo]

I like using the LCD more than the viewfinder ... but on my camera, the viewfinder works much better in low light situations.

 

[Towncrier]

I'm with Dan on the question of screen/viewfinder usage. The nice thing about the screen is that it is WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). With the viewfinder, the picture I take is not cropped the same way in the viewfinder as it is in the resulting image. Not a big deal, but a bit annoying when trying to get the most out of 2megapixels.

On the other hand, I always use the viewfinder in situations where it is too dark to see an image on the screen. It comes in really handy for those circumstances.

 

[ToyStory Fan]

Jill,

I would agree that with the digital you will likely take more pictures, but you can also delete on the fly for pics that didn't come out as nice as you would've liked.

On to a different topic though, what are your plans for printing out the pictures? I'm not familiar with your camera, but I'm guessing 4 megapixel or more. If you plan on using it just for web pics then the medium setting is fine, but in the event you get a GREAT shot that you want to print out at a Kodak Picture Maker and blow up to 8x10 you may not get a great picture.

I'm sure some of thepros will argue, but I ALWAYS use the best quality setting so that if I do get that GREAT shot I'll be able to get the best quality out of a larger picture. That will most likely cut your number of pics in half though.

What you don't want to do is what happened to someone here and that was using one of the Disney memory stick to CD burners...they lost all of their pictures. If you have a laptop bring it and download the pictures from the camera.