12MP means it takes photos up to 12-megapixels (pictures composed of 12 million pixels). For example my mum's (few-years-old) Kodak is a 4MP camera, and it takes photos with dimensions of 2304 x 1728 pixels. 2304 x 1728 = 3,981,312 = ~4million pixels.
My newer Ricoh Caplio camera is 7MP, and takes photos up to 3072 x 2304 = 7,077,888 pixels.
More MP = more detail that can be captured in the photo but also more space needed to store the image.
How many photos you can fit on 32MB will depend on your shooting settings. My Ricoh lets me shoot smaller pictures using less than the full 7MP if I want (5MP, 3MP, 1MP and 640x480) and two different quality settings. It saves the pictures in JPEG, which is a compressed format (JPEG is the universal default but some cameras let you save in other formats that may take more space). On the very highest setting (7MP "fine" i.e. low compression), pictures come in at about 2.5 megabytes each, so on 32MB I would only fit about 12. However if I knock back to 7MP "normal", pictures are only about 1.4MB, then I could fit about 22 pictures on 32MB of memory. At 3MP "normal" pictures were only about 660KB, so I would fit about 48 on 32MB.
It's hard to say how many you'll be able to save since I don't know how big your photos may come out at, since the size will depend on the level of JPEG compression that that the camera uses. I would guess though that for a full 12MP image it may take 3MB or more of space, so you might fit less than 12 on the internal memory.
Phineus wrote:
I can't see anything on that page about the type of card it uses
From the
page: "SD/MMC Expansion card slot"
You can load a "SecureDigital" memory card into the camera, which is a standard format of card for cameras. Most cameras are really designed to work off a memory card - the internal memory doesn't count for anything. These days you can get SD cards of capacities of 1GB, 2GB or more quite cheap (
example). I use a 1GB SD card with my Ricoh which can easily store hundreds of photos at the highest setting.
Edit: slow typer