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Being very geen at this,can I possibly send 20 photos from a Sony digital camera average size 750kb to a floppy disc or have I got this all wrong,do I change or download from the camera in a different format

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Ricky,

A floppy will hold one file of the size you mentioned – 750kb. Formatted floppies weigh in with about 1.2MB useable space.

Not sure what ‘geen’ means – jargon alert! I assume that’s slang for new to this sorta thing.

If you can change the format in your camera to something like PNG, or JPG, you will be able to squeeze more onto a disk. JPG is a lossy format though, it discards color information to get the space back, and you can sometimes see artifacts in the pictures. JPG has a quality setting that can change the file’s ultimate size as well.

Bottom line, if you want to save a lot of pictures for later editing on a PC, the floppy is NOT the way to go. By all rights it should have been obsolete technology years ago.

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I know your post is a month old, but here is what I have learned recently since I got a Sony DSC P3 for my birthday last year:

My Sony camera, probably like yours, outputs files with a .jpg at the end of the file name. I used the menu to set my picture size to 1920 x 1440 pixels, ‘fine’ standard. My pictures are mostly just over 1.1 Mbytes on the internal memory stick and each one would therefore fill most of a floppy disc. I have the option on my camera (via the Menu button) to choose to shoot pictures of various pixel sizes down to 640 x 480 pixels. This is one third the pixel count in both height and width and would therefore make my files one ninth their size.

I don’t do that because I may want to enlarge some of my shots. If I enlarge my pictures more and more there comes a point where successive magnification leads to loss of clarity. Imagine looking at a newspaper photo with a magnifying glass. I have deliberately chosen 1920 x 1440 instead of 640 x 480 because (should I ever want to, and who knows the future?) I can enlarge the picture three times more before I lose the clarity.

Back to your question about saving pictures. I normally save my pictures on a CD-ROM and each blank CD-ROM will hold over 700 pictures. Windows XP is particularly friendly (compared to earlier versions of Windows) to camera users and makes it comparatively easy to copy pictures from your camera to a CD.

I use PaintShop Pro to “downsize” my pictures before e-mailing them because people on dial-up connections hate big files. PSP uses additional metrics when describing files. One of these is ‘resolution’ which is measured in dots per inch. PSP assumes (rightly or wrongly) that my camera took pictures at 150 pixels per inch so this makes each picture about 12.8″ x 9.6″. Before I e-mail a picture I use PSP to resize it to 5″ x 3.75″ and I also reduce the resolution to 75 pixels per inch. Then, using the Options button on the Save As dialogue box I select a compression factor of 20. The resulting picture is less than 30k bytes instead of 1.2 Mbytes.

HTH

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