I will be heading off on a months holiday to Europe shortly with my Canon A80 & I have a few questions...
1) if I keep image compression/quality on the default (which I think is average) will that be sufficient if I mainly only want typcial 4 x 6 photos printed with maybe the occassional image blown up a bit more?

2) I'm planning on taking 2 x 256mb cards - how many photos should I be able to store?

Thanks

Personally I ALWAYS run my Canon A70 on the max resolution since then I've got the best soruce if I decide later to make a A4 size print. You would still get about 120 pictures I think with each card. So I would bring a X-Drive thingy to copy the pictures to, a laptop or stop by a photoshop and get your pictures burnt to a CD...

Cobos

Lucy, I'm not sure what your quality default is, but I just got back from Europe and got 170 pictures on a 128 card at 2 mega pix which is more than sufficient for typical 4 x 6 photos. My default was 1 mega pix (I believe).

Having said that, just about in all major interenet cafes in Europe, you will be able to transfer your photos to a CD. It cost me 10 Euros to do mine in Killarney, and someone I met had done the same thing in a different city for 6 Euros.

Hope this helps.

I have a Canon A80 and I usually keep it on the fine (default/medium) compression setting. I used it to shoot about 400 pictures in Hawaii recently. The 4x6s look just fine, and frankly so do the several 8x10s that I had printed.

At that setting, I get about 120-140 shots on my 256 card.

I agree with the others -- you shouldn't have much trouble finding places to have the images transferred to a CD.

Hi Lucy,

Since you have already paid for the 4Mpx, it would be a waste to shhot at lower resolutions.

You don't know when you might want a blow up of a portion of a pic.

I would invest in one 128 MB card.

I have a canon a80 and keep the resolution set to superfine for maximum quality. I get around 120 pictures per 256mb card.

The thing to keep in mind is that while you may be thinking all you ever want is a 4x6 of the picture, what do you do if that once in a lifetime photo comes along and you want an enlargement? With resolution set at maximum I get 11x14 enlargements that you cannot distinguish from film. I'm glad I took this approach because I got several memorable photos that now are hanging on my walls.

If you run out of memory, you can always either buy another card or have the pictures put on a cd and start the cards over.

Hi Lucy - I read a post about this not long ago and learned that if you have an iPod you can download pictures onto it with the help of a Belkin cord (about $100 at CompUSA). We too have a Canon A80 and my son has an iPod. Since we are planning a trip to Europe this summer, we thought we would give the Belkin cord a try. It works (!) and since the storage capacity of the iPod is very generous this is less expensive than buying several more memory cards. There may be more knowledgeable photographers out there who have better solutions or may see a downside to this plan but this seems to be a solution for us. Of course, the key is having the iPod. Hope this helps. Bon voyage.

My solution is a 2 gig microdrive (same size as CompactFlash Type II). It ran $250 purchased online. I will be able to keep about 800 photos (actually many more after I crop some of them in the camera and delete the originals).

Keith