A Camera, a memory card and a question

[DisneyBoy]

I know this will sound hilarious, but keep your minds clean folks, okay

Let's say you buy a new digital camera, and a new memory card. You bring it home, you put the memory card in and you take some pictures and you take some video. Ultimately you decide you don't really like the camera, so you transfer the pics onto your computer, and then, after you've unplugged the camera, you click a "delete all frames" button. It warns you it might take a few minutes to delete everything, but to your surprise, everything is deleted in about three seconds. Supposedly. After all, there was video on there (about 6 minutes worth) so for all that to be deleted in a mere three seconds makes you suspicious.

After everything is supposedly deleted you press the "play" arrow on the back of the camera to see what pics pop up - nothing does. It says there are none. Great! So you pop out the memory card (which you're keeping because you're going to buy a new camera soon), go back to the store and return only the camera.

...is it possible, conceivable or likely that the photos and video you took are still somehow in the camera itself? I mean, you used the memory card, and then you deleted them. But then, it deleted pretty quickly, and cameras - like computers - might possibly have some wonky internal memory thing, right?

I figured the camera without the memory card was like a old fashioned camera without film in it.

So tell me whether I'm right or not And thank you (both for the insights and for not laughing).

[krosfyah]

Digital cameras have small internal memories so you can take pics without a card. depending on the camera if a memory card is inserted into it, the camera defaults to that and only saves images and video to the card. if that's the case there wouldn't be any writing to the internal memory, but again, that might not be the case. I think some cameras you have to set the device manually (location of where you want to save)

[wyldman11]

Not sure it is the same as the way PCs used to/still work. The pc technically still has the information till something new is added, this is why there is software for data recovery but you pretty much can only run that software after accidental deletion.

[DisneyBoy]

Digital cameras have small internal memories so you can take pics without a card. depending on the camera if a memory card is inserted into it, the camera defaults to that and only saves images and video to the card. if that's the case there wouldn't be any writing to the internal memory, but again, that might not be the case. I think some cameras you have to set the device manually (location of where you want to save)

Okay - when I put the memory card into the camera, though, there was no pop-up question on the view screen about where I wanted to save things to.

[Divia]

I have a canon point and shoot for like 130.00 or so. And I can only take like two pictures without the memory card. It worns me there is not enough space. Then if I put the memory card it everything is fine. It does not tell me that I have to click on a setting or anything like that. It just defaults to the memory card.

You should be fine. And stop taking dirty pics

[DisneyBoy]

Haha - no not dirty pics, but work-related stuff that I could get into trouble with should they pop up elsewhere.

It was a Fujifilm camera, not a canon...and I've tried to call their help-line with no luck. Had to leave a message. Very annoying.

[Divia]

I'm going to assume *ahem* that its all the same. But you know what they say about taht

[DisneyBoy]

So, just to wrap this little story up (in case anyone ends up with a similar question) - if you've put the memory card into the camera before taking any pictures, then the pictures are on the card only. If you take some pics on the camera without using a memory card (you can probably only take about 4 or 5 in this "Demo" mode) then those would remain as part of the camera's built-in memory.