Instruction manual

53
5.1.5 Hard Drive
Even a two-gigabyte drive will fill up rapidly. Fortunately large hard drives are
inexpensive, so choose at least 40 GB with at least 15 GB of free space. If you
plan to do a lot of photography and editing, go for 80-100 GB. If you do not have
a large hard drive, consider an external USB hard drive.
The following gives some idea of the storage space you’ll need on your
computer for photos, based on 3-megapixel resolution with different quality
settings:
3-Megapixel image
format
Storage per 100
photos
Capacity per
gigabyte
TIF
900 MB
1,100 photos
High-quality JPEG
150 MB
670 photos
Typical JPEG
50 MB
2,000 photos
Highly-compressed JPEG
25 MB
4,000 photos
Typical video storage requirements:
Video
Storage per hour of
play
Capacity per
gigabyte
Digital video
13 GB
5 minutes
MPEG-1 movie
(352x288)
620 KB
1.5 hours
MPEG-2 movie
(720x576)
3 GB
20 minutes
MPEG-4 movie
(720x576)
400 KB
3 hours
PVR, highest quality
3 GB
20 minutes
PVR, extended play
1 GB
1 hour
Note: MPEG-1 is a CD video format and MPEG-2 is a DVD video format. These
compressed video formats allow you to store an hour of digital video on a CD or 2
hours on a DVD.
5.1.6 Ports
Most computers come with a serial port and one or more USB ports.
Transferring photos via the serial port is very slow, while the older USB 1 ports
are somewhat faster. The fastest ports used by today’s computers are the USB 2
port (which is backward compatible with USB 1 devices) and the FireWire (IEEE
1394 or i.Link) ports; both of these are excellent for downloading photos from a
camera or via a USB card reader (see Accessories, below).