[Quo Fan]

I'm curious as to the general size of a 7.1mp photo size. I know it depends on compression, what you are shooting and crap like that. My company tasked me to find the feasibility of going digital in the photo department. The boss is concerned that pics will get lost, not transered to disc, etc. The boss found a camera, but wants to know what kind of periferal costs she is going to encounter.

<edit> The memory cards need to hold something like 400-500 photos, potentialy, because they may not be downloaded daily, or even weekly.

 

[binary visions]

Generally, 7 megapixel images will be between 3 and 4 megabytes apiece. DPReview says that the Canon SD800's 7.1 megapixel images come in at 3,500 KB each set to "Fine JPEG".

 

[Kornphlake]

Really it depends on the camera, a DSLR or high end point and shoot has the capability of shooting raw images that will take up several times more memory than a JPEG and give some more flexibility for post processing the size will vary from camera to camera and from one manufacturer to the next. As for images getting lost, I'd think it no more likely than loosing film, actually I'd think digital images are more secure because you could upload them to a server from anywhere in the world and not have to worry about loosing them during travel. Digital information stored for commercial purposes should be backed up and secured according to industry standard practices, really it's a no brainer, the only danger would be someone saying "hey this memory card is full, I can't remember if I uploaded the images or not but I really need this picture so I'll just reformat the card."

The prices of flash memory have come down quite a bit, you can get 1 gb cards that will easily hold 300+ images for the cost of a few rolls of good film, if I were a commercial photographer or I'd have no problem investing in a dozen or more cards, they are pretty portable and incredibly rugged for the most part.

 

[Quo Fan]

The boss said that we don't have a large budget for the photography department, so we are looking at point and shoot digitals.

She found a Canon A550 at Staples for under $200. I checked on it, it is a nice camera, but it comes with only a 16 meg card. I also looked at mem cards, and they were fairly cheap for 1 gig cards, like $20-30 each.