[midnightvisions]

Hello,

So i was doing a bit of photo taking with my K-70, taking pics in jpg, dng&raw, and video and could not figure out how much space was left on the memory card.

I know there is a picture countdown timer on the lower left, but jpg space does not equal the same amount of space as dng&raw, and even less for how much video has been shot.

Computers show free hard drive space as a pie chart, and that has more relevance to free space to me than what is being shown just with numbers now.

Has anybody suggested a pie chart graph to Pentax before to show memory card remaining capacity? I suppose it would take one pie chart for jpg pictures, one for dng&raw pictures, and one for video, showing remaining time for the current video mode, and remaining time with the other video modes.

As far as I can tell there is nothing that even shows current used space by pictures or video. Is there a reason this is not being done?

Thanks in advance.

[Adam]

What the camera gives you is a worst-case estimate of the photos remaining, which IMO is more than sufficient for planning how many memory cards to take for a trip. It's probably also the most compact way to display this information within the camera's limited screen space. While a percentage or Mb usage might also be nice as a menu option, it's mostly meaningless without a frame count such as what's already offered, IMO.

[joergens.mi]

I think there is no need for some curious pie charts.
The camera shows the number of remaining pictures in current mode (a very conservative assumption typically you get al least 50% more as predicted) or the the remaining time in the current video mode.
if you change the mode the number of pictures / time changes according to the mode. for me the remaining pictures in the current mode is much more important than the availiable space in GB or %.
I don't think there is no need for more.

[photoptimist]

First, a pie chart can only show how space has been used but can't really show how the % of empty space might be used.

The deeper problem is that what you ask for is more complicated than it first appears. There are at least 7 different video modes on the K-70, each with a different minutes/GB memory consumption rate. And there are literally dozens of permutations of modes for still photo settings (JPG,RAW,RAW+, image size, image quality). Moreover, there's at least a 100:1 ratio between the largest file size (RAW) and smallest (small, low-quality JPG) make it really hard to show a meaningful chart on the tiny LCD of the camera.

Your camera's manual probably has a chart in the back on the typical numbers of images (for each image size/quality setting) for a typical memory card.

If you only use a few video and stills modes, you could use joergens.mi's suggestion of setting the camera in each mode, writing down the camera's "shots remaining" figure and creating your own little chart of ratios (e.g., there's 3.5 large high-quality JPGs per RAW, etc.).

[midnightvisions]

you could use joergens.mi's suggestion of setting the camera in each mode, writing down the camera's "shots remaining"

A pie chart would show each picture and video format on the card, and it would show how much space is remaining according to each image format. I don't consider camera programming space limited, as its much easier for manufacturers to buy higher capacity memory than lower capacity. Actually even for consumers, lower capacity memory is going away in favor of higher capacity. 1, 2, and 4Gb memory cards have all disappeared from the store shelves in favor of 32Gb, 64Gb, and 128Gb.

Ok, thanks for the opinions, guess I'll bin this idea.