A 16MB SD Memory Card

Yes, you read correct. A 16MB SD card. These days 16MB is tiny. It's crazy to think there was a time when it was the latest thing, and biggest capacity available. Although I don't think it remained that way for very long. I think these SD cards were supplied for free with cameras that came with no internal memory. I received one of these cards with a Canon PowerShot S2 IS bridge camera I recently bought. The camera wouldn't work, or a least couldn't take a picture until the 16MB memory card was inserted.

Canon camera 16 megabyte old SD memory N118 - R05134WR
A genuine Canon SDC card

So I presume this is one of the earlier digital camera models that came with no internal memory and had to be supplied with an SD card to get the user started. I believe this storage size is still used in some games consoles, such as the Nintendo WII and Game Cube. And by the looks of things on eBay, still very sought after. Anyway, back to SD cards and cameras.

How many pictures can a 16MB SD card hold


That is solely dependant on the size and quality of the image. If you put a 16MB card into a camera that's shooting at say 5 mega pixels, it can hold just a few images. Shooting at 10 mega pixels (where each image is roughly around 4.5 megabytes @ high quality), even less. But if a person changes the settings of their camera so that it is taking pictures at 1 mega pixel (1024x768 @ roughly just under 500KB per photo) at super fine quality, they can safely get around 20 - 25 images.

Lower the image quality settings of the camera and you can add a few more photos to the total amount. It should be noted, that the amount of usable space on a 16 megabyte card is around 14MB, so 20 - 25 images @ 1 mega pixel each is a low but safe estimate.


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