I am a big picture taker and wondered how many CF cards to take. What do most of you do? I can see lots and lots of pictures coming home from our first trip to Maui.

Buy a Nixvue Digital Wallet, or similar portable hard drive (even Ipods have attachments now to download flash cards) and you don't have to invest/carry a bunch of flash cards. It takes the worry out of "will I run out of memory?"

I have enough memory stick for about 500 shots (not nearly enough for a week's trip). I also have a 30gig Xs-Drive. When the stick is full I pop it into the Xs-Drive load it in. They have several version now. I have the basic model of a couple of years ago. It has slots for all the common cards and sticks and can operate on AC or DC power including it's own recargeable batteries. When you get home you just plug it into your USB port and away you go (with the Xs-Drive on AC power of course since you don't want the battery to die in the middle of a download). Mine has proven reliable. Much smaller and less "thief-tempting" than a laptop and easier to hide or carry along. Here's some more info...I have no stake in the company, I'm just a happy customer:

http://www.xs-drive.com/

I have a 32 (came with camera), 124 & 256 card. It's about 700 pictures.

When we visit my Grandson, I have my son download and burn a CD of my pictures so I can delete that card. When we go camping I'll take my laptop and can download the pictures. I took 1300 pictures in a 16 day period.

I know that Kinko's, Costco's and some Wal-Marts have the kiosks to download from your cards and burn them onto CD's.

Utahtea

of course, how many pictures you get on the card all depends on what resolution the camera does and the compression ratio it uses. the real question is how many pictures will you need to take? and then work backwards from there

the plus side to a digital camera is there's no development factor, so you can discard pictures as needed on the spot. in most cases, you can decrease the resolution on the camera to make room for more photos.

all of the above offloading solutions are good though. in addition, if your camera supports plugging it directly into a USB PC and being acknowledged as external storage without needing software, you might be able to take it to an internet cafe type place which presumably can burn a cd for you.

At high the highest resolution on my camera (a 3.1), 1 photo=1 MB. So a 256 MB card is adequate for a weeklong trip.

Suzanne brings up a good point. During a recent 9 day trip to southern Utah I took about 700 images on a 2.1 MP camera. Only about 400 "made the cut" when I got home but I don't like to do too much deleting since many shots can be improved at home with Photoshop or any of the other fine editing software.
If all you'll ever want to do is view your images on the PC then lower res shots are fine. If you want to print images and especially if you want 8" X 10" or larger sizes, you'll want to be shooting at your cameras highest resolution. I made the mistake of shooting at the lowest res on a trip to the Virgin Islands and I now have some shots that I deeply regret cannot be printed larger than 4" X 6". Never again! I'm hi res all the time now baby! This is why I bought the Xs-Drive and now I need it more than ever since I've moved up to a 5MP DSC-F717.
I leave all my origianl; files on the Xs-Drive as yet another back-up of my image files. It will take a while to fill up 30GBs.

incidentally, just for my own sake, i looked up what kinkos has to offer and it seems they use the Sony PhotoStation which allows you to make prints as well as burn to CD.

Sony has a locator which will find the closest locations based on an address you specify:

http://clients.mapquest.com/sony/mqi...nect?link=find

Bring several small cards or a drive for downloading the pictures. During a recent vacation I met someone who had her camera stolen near the end of her vacation. She had used only one very large card, and because this card was in the stolen camera, all the photos from her vacation were lost.

With small cards you can keep used cards separate from the camera, preventing this type of total loss.

I do a lot of deleting in the camera, as well as cropping to smaller size photos and deleting the originals.

One thing to be careful of... deleting a more or less duplicate photo and finding out when you finally view the remaining picture in the computer, that it wasn?t as good as you thought.

Keith

We have an eFILM with a 20 gig hard drive. It was great. Every night, we would download our pictures (from two digital cameras) and then quickly view them on the screen to make sure everything looked fine before erasing the CF and starting again the next day. We were gone for 3.5 weeks and managed to shoot over 2000 pictures. Now that they've been moved to our PC, we are reviewing them and trying to cut it down to a nice number for printing.

Betty

I use a 40gb SmartDisk FlashTrax. It has a 3.5" color LCD screen that lets you preview your pictures.

ttt

I change the resolution based on the pic I am taking.

I use a 5 mp camera and for most shots I use a modest resolution setting. However, if I am taking a pic that I think I might want to enlarge and/or frame...then I take the pic on a higher resolution setting.