Media

This is the biggest difference between traditional film and digital photography.


Traditional Film Based Photography

There are a number of manufacturers of photographic film, including Ilford, Kodak, Fujifilm, and Agfa.  Although with the popularity of digital photography the selection of photographic film is decreasing, with some manufacturers completely finishing their production of photographic film.

Basically there are three types of photographic film:

Colour Print Film
Colour Slide Film
Black and White Print Film

These types films are available in different sizes, 35mm (for SLRs), 120 for larger more professional cameras.

Within these three types of film, there are different film speeds, eg 100, 200, 400.  These are the different ratings for the sensitivity of the films, measured in the ISO standard.  The lower the film speed the better the finished photograph looks, but more light (and therefore lower shutter speed) is required.

Finally, the films are available in different film lengths, usually stated as 12, 24 or 36 exposure films.

Digital Media (Memory) Cards


These cards have been described as digital film !


There are a number of different memory cards available on the market today, with some being replaced with newer upgraded formats.


The most common are:

Secure Digital
Compact Flash
XD
Sony Memory Stick

In the case of the two last types of card, these are specifically for Olympus and some fujifilm cameras, and Sony cameras.

With the other cards, these are compatible with most other makes of camera, with some manufacturers moving between one format to the other, for example Canon who have used the older compact flash for some cameras and the newer Secure Digital for other cameras.

Multimedia cards look identical to Secure Digital memory cards with their size and shape but the difference is that the Secure Digital cards have a slide switch that can lock the card so that nothing can either be deleted nor added, making these cards safer when using on other peoples computers where you can lock the card to prevent the spread of any computer viruses.

All the memory cards come in capacities ranging from 512Mb to 16Gb, or even higher, with the exclusion of the XD cards who have a range up to 2Gb.

The memory cards also come in a range of write / read speeds, ranging from 2Mb per second up to 30Mb per second, with the latter more important to those who use HD video recording and high speed of frames per second when using RAW format.