Mary writes, "I'm going on a two week vacation to Hawaii. My digital camera currently has a 512MB memory card. I'm planning to take lots of photos, but I have no idea if my card will be big enough."
Whether your camera's flash memory card will be big enough to hold all of your pictures depends on many factors, starting with how many pictures you define as "lots of photos". This is further complicated by not knowing which quality setting you've chosen in the camera settings. And it's also important to know how many megapixels images taken by your camera can be.
My recommendation will always be to have a spare card on hand, because you never know when you might want to take more photos. 1GB memory cards are often available for well under $20, making it a modest addition to your vacation budget. It is possible to make a good guess as to how many photos you can fit on a single memory card using the following chart as a guideline. All you need to know is the Megapixels number for your digital camera.
| Photo Quality | 128MB | 256MB | 512MB | 1GB | 2GB | 4GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 Megapixel | 134 | 268 | 552 | 1119 | 2245 | 4494 |
| 3 Megapixel | 120 | 240 | 490 | 996 | 2000 | 4000 |
| 4 Megapixel | 60 | 119 | 245 | 497 | 999 | 1998 |
| 5 Megapixel | 48 | 95 | 195 | 395 | 800 | 1595 |
| 6 Megapixel | 44 | 88 | 180 | 366 | 735 | 1471 |
| 7 Megapixel | 39 | 78 | 161 | 327 | 657 | 1314 |
| 8 Megapixel | 35 | 69 | 143 | 290 | 582 | 1164 |
| 10 Megapixel | 26 | 53 | 109 | 221 | 444 | 887 |
| 12 Megapixel | 20 | 40 | 83 | 169 | 339 | 678 |
| Number of photos per card | ||||||
