Is this normal?

[walkien]

I just bought a 512 mb CF card yesterday, and try to format it in my Canon G2, it shown only 487mb. Is this normal?

[John_T]

I believe it is. There is an explanation of how it's calculated which you could Google "CF capacity" or something, but I'm sure someone here will kick in and tell you soon.

For expample, my 1GB card formats to 982 MB.

[house]

I know my 128mb cards never show 128mb after a formatting. It's always a few less. It's normal, although I'm not entirely sure why.

[garethhhhh]

Perfectly normal I'm affraid...

Here is why.

1 kilobyte is actually 1024 bytes
therefore
1 megabyte is actually 1024 x 1024 kilobytes = 1.048576 Megabytes
therefore
512 Megabytes is roughly 487 x 1.048576 = 510.65651 Megabytes :wink:

They do the same thing with your Computers hard drive nowadays
I have a 40GB harddrive in my laptop but it is actually 37.2 GB

bummer... :(

[walkien]

Thank you all for the info

[billbr]

At work we refer to engineering megabytes (2 to the 20th power) and marketing megabytes (10 to the 6th power). 8)

[pradeep1]

At work we refer to engineering megabytes (2 to the 20th power) and marketing megabytes (10 to the 6th power). 8)

In non-geek speak:

Engineering = 1,048,576 bytes to a megabyte
Marketing = 1,000,000 bytes to a megabyte

Almost a 5% loss of storage space from claimed to actually what you see after you format it.

Fun, fun.