The number of pictures you can put on the cd depends on a couple of things--1) the file size of the cd, and 2) the file size of the compact flash you are using, although this isn't as important as the cd size. I typically will shoot on larger cards, but because I'm shooting for the high school yearbook when I'm shoooting sports, I shoot in basic, which is about .50 mb per shot. With a 512 card, I can shoot close to 700 pix per event. Because I'm shooting with a d2h at high speed, I'm shooting the athletes at 7.5 frames per second. Then I download to the cd, and many times I can put 2 or 3 partially shot flash cards on the cd. I use cds that are 700 mb size. There is no viewer on the unit, however I don't reformat the card (therefore erasing it) until I've checked the pictures on my laptop. I really like the cut down version of software called iview because it is fast, and I'm not tied into saving any of the pictures to my computer's hard drive. Once I know the cards are saved to the cd, I erase them from the compact flash.

When I'm shooting for beauty, I shoot in jpeg/large files so I can get the best quality available without committing to RAW or NEF files. Some argue you can't get good quality unless you shoot raw and you can't make big prints either. Baloney. I just enlarged a shot of the Plum Beach Lighthouse to 40" X 60" for a display we were having at the Providence Boat Show--it was beautiful. There was no apparent digital break up of the print and everything held up nicely. It was shot with a d100 (6 million pixels) in jpeg and I was greatly impressed with the results. The file size at jpeg with the d100 is about 2.5 mb, so you can't get quite as many frames on the compact flash or onto the cd while shooting larger files.