h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

1. You should get far more than 35 shots on a 1GB card at 6Mp. Where did you get that number from?

2. If you are looking at storage devices, you should consider the Epson P2000. This has a class-beating screen at a fraction of the cost of, say, the offering from Nikon.

I've recently bought a Canon EOS 20D and I can get 280-290 shots at max resolution (8 mega-pixel) from a 1GB card. Two cards are generally sufficient for most situations.

I think the 35 shots might be a missprint. Firstly I was talking about 8mega pixel cameras like my own Canon EOS350D.
Also at max resolution i am talking about RAW data not JPGs which take up a fair amount more of room.

According to Canon's offical website, my CANON 350D a 125MB card can fit 56 RAW images. That isn't too bad really, but when i am travelling like don't want to be limited by how many photos i can take, i like to go overboard!

My camera has a function in which it can take both raw and jpgs at the highest resolution simulataneously. This is great for travelling for 2 reasons. The JPGs are good for emailing back home (although they will probabily need to be reduced in size since one of my photos is usually 10MB!). The RAW data photos, don't cut out anything in the picture like the JPGs so they are good to take home and process with photoshop or whatever program you use. You need to think that every photo you take has potential to be a great photo so you wouldn't want to sell yourself short with only JPGs (depending on of course your use of photos etc, I work for a magazine so i guess i am a bit fussier).

Well hope that helps.
My X-drive has not only proved to be useful travelling, but also is a great little portable hardrive for big computer documents etc. And it is an MP3 player (though bigger than IPod).

As these cameras get better and better for cheaper, memory is going to be an increasing problem.

Thankfully memory is also getting smaller and cheaper so no worries there.

Anyway, one thing you seem to have missed completely is that pretty much any decent sized town in any country will have a camera shop where you can get photos from your memory cards put onto cd for a small charge.

Some (many? most? all? je ne sais pas) internet cafes also provide CD/DVD burning services.

By the way, well done on getting this in, Agel_Sizr

In response to:

"any decent sized town in any country will have a camera shop where you can get photos from your memory cards put onto cd for a small charge..."

Well obviously we have a difference in the definition of "TRAVEL". I agree most cities have these facilities.

In most towns around Australia you would be hard pressed to get your images burnt to CD, or for these so called camera shops to be even open normal business hours. Perhaps in the UK and the US towns are much larger.

Anyway I didn't really want to talk about that. What i wanted to talk about is that many people like to travel off the beaten track. At least I do. So you may spend long periods of time without visiting cities or large towns with these facilities.

Anyway all i tried to do with my article is provide an insight into what to do if you are going on a big trip with a fancy camera but you didn't want to bring a laptop and you did want to take alot of photos without bothering to hunt down camera shops etc.

Might i point out something. My 40gig x-drive cost me $250AUD off the internet and it works great. My 1gig card cost me $170. So just look at that, I got 40x the memory for less than twice the cost. I think that is pretty good value, and it great to backup all my photos in the field without bothering with camera shops (particularily in non english speaking countries).

Anyway thanks for all the input guys. I only wish that i could still edit these 'published' entries, with all of these great points.

Anyway I am off again to use my gear in a 3 week trip around the backwaters of China so if i get anymore insights into all of this i will post it.

Enjoy the trip!!

This entry was in PeerReview for almost a month, and there were very changes made to the original text submitted by agel. Guys, if you know anything about any of the subjects that are in there at the moment, please jump in and suggest any changes you think are appropriate! We're always looking for new Researchers who are happy to help shape good entries like this and add their own comments.

See you there!