and I just wanted to add, that I actualy find jeffrey’s post (1 before that) most educating and interesting. Although it was a bit harsh of him to start with words “I’d say that this article fails” :)
Nevertheless, If someone knows better, they should talk so we can learn from it. That what I think.

I don’t see anything wrong with getting facts straight. I see a different issue: This info was not given to us as a authors guess, or opinion. It was given like a pure truth, which is wasn’t. That worries me a little as for quality of other info, advice, explanation I am getting here. So it si a good reality check. While this site is extremely good and helpfull, I think its very important that we all get smarter and educated by getting the proper info. You dont have to get deep into math, computer science, or nuclear disbalance chemistry, but no reason to expain things wrong way. It wont benefit newbies, and will turn off the pros. IMHO, anyway. No disrespect or offence meant to anyone.

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010010000001110100011011110010000001100100011100100110
100101101110011010110010000001111001011011110111010101
110010001000000100111101110110011000010110110001110100
01101001011011100110010100101110

Given that this is such a technical and complex topic, I think it was very well summarized in such a short post.

I’d say that this article fails to go over the importance of 12-bit and 14-bit images. The JPEG implementation that most computers use usually only does 8-bit images (AFAIK). You get 12 and 14 bit images from shooting in RAW. The nice thing about 12-14 bit images is that you get a better _dynamic range_. Although you might not get a wider range (someone verify this?) you’ll definitely get a finer gradiation/steps between each color that can make all the difference in post processing. For example – say something is majorly underexposed. When you up the exposure in post, 12-14 bit images offer you 16-64 times more colors, so you’ll probably be able to extract more detail. =]

A hard drive that is marketed as being “500GB” is in fact roughly 500,000,000,000 bytes in size, thus using the “metric” giga meaning 1,000,000,000. This is roughly 465 of the “computer” gigabytes, as described in the article.

However, that space is allocated in sectors (typically 512 bytes), and organized by the operating system into blocks, which are usually 4kB (so eight sectors). As dan indicates, every file is allocated in terms of these blocks, so there is an average of 2kB of wasted space per file. However, this wasted space is not a consideration when discussing the total drive capacity.

There are a number of tables on the disk that are used by the operating system to actually locate the correct blocks, which does reduce the available space or capacity. In the grand scheme of things, however, the difference between metric or hard drive marketing GB (1,000,000,000 bytes) and computer or binary GB (1,073,741,824 bytes) is much larger than the amount of disk space consumed by these tables.

The question is a good one to answer, as there is frequently confusion when people ask why their drive is smaller than advertised, but a better answer than what is in the article would be beneficial.

Anyhow, that’s a connection between bits, bytes, and megapixels. Enjoy!

A 2GB drive that you buy will typically be very close to 2,000,000,000 bytes, which is actually only 1.86GB, properly counted (1.86* 1024 * 1024 * 1024). The manufacturers use 1000 rather than 1024 to artificially inflate advertised drive prices.