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The cost of storing photos on Memory Sticks is about 1,500 times the cost of storing them on a CD.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
The cost of using memory cards for longterm storage and other mailbag questions


March 26, 2006


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, The Post-Standard

   I have a lot of ground to cover this week as I try to catch up with questions. Here goes:
   
   PRECIOUS MEMORIES: My brother in law just keeps buying new Memory Sticks and uses the "old" ones for storing his photos. This seems too expensive for me. What do you think? -- A.T.
   Your brother-in-law needs a better financial adviser. He should try storing his pictures on CD-Rs before he runs out of money. A blank CD-R costs, at most, about 20 cents if you buy CDs in bulk. Each CD holds 650 megabytes of pictures. The largest Memory Stick I can use on my camera, the Sony DSC F707, holds 128 megabytes, so I'd need five of these Memory Sticks to hold the same photos as one CD. That would cost me $300. So the cost of storing on Memory Sticks is about 1,500 times the cost of storing them on a CD.
   
   DRAWING A BLANK: When I am running Windows Media Player and play a movie or DVD in full-screen mode, something weird happens. When I try to capture the screen using the Print Screen key, the image saved in the clipboard is usually just all black. What am I doing wrong? -- J. S.
   When images such as DVDs or MPEG videos are shown full-screen, the software bypasses the operating system and sends the images directly to the screen buffer of the graphics card. This provides much better performance on older computers and even helps on modern ones. But this end-run around the operating system means that standard screen-capture methods won't "see" the video. They'll only capture a blank, or black, screen.
   Works great -- better performance and all that -- but the operating system and its helper software can't capture that part of the screen. It's blank as far as the operating system is concerned.
   But specially written software can sneak past this barrier to capture a snapshot of the video. Here are some Web sites that offer software that will do this:
   
   Windows:
   www.cyberlink.com/english/products/powerdvd/tips_tricks/screen/screen_tips.jsp
   www.any-capture.com
   www.fox-magic.com/mc_gb/dvd_screen_capture.html
   
   Mac OS X:
   www.digitallyobsessed.com.
   
   PICTURE THIS: In an article from a year ago (March 20, 2005) you recommended the JPEG2000 lossless image format. You indicated that file sizes got smaller. But when I turn an image into a lossless JPEG2000 image, the file is three times the size of the same picture saved as a JPEG! What's happening? -- D.P.
   About 90 percent of all the photographic images we see on the Web are JPEGs. The magic of JPEG processing is the way it reduces file size without much of a noticeable loss in quality. But there is, indeed, a loss, and anyone who repeatedly saves, edits and resaves JPEG images worsens the loss because commulative compression effects can ruin JPEG photos.
   JPEG2000 has a lossless mode that prevents this from happening. This newer method compresses file sizes also, but not as thoroughly as the JPEG process.
   I convert all my images from TIFF, the format I use when I'm editing images, to lossless JPEG2000 before I archive them. This saves a great deal of file space, and the images are not altered at all.