What is Format?

What Does Format Mean

From French format or Italian format , the term format refers to the size and measurements of a form , a photograph , a painting , etc. For example: “Please print these documents in A4 format that I must present them to the municipality” , “The manual is in Legal format, so we need a larger folder to store it” , “Fabián gave me a 13 × format photo frame 18 " .

The formats of paper best known are those standardized in 1922 by the DIN 476 standard of a German institution. This standard served as the basis for an international equivalent ( ISO 216 ), although many countries still use other traditional systems.

The formats recognized by ISO 216 are divided into three series ( A , B and C ), with sizes from 0 to 10 . The most popular paper format worldwide is A4 (that is, Series A Size 4 , equivalent to 210 x 297 millimeters ).
In the United States and in some Latin American countries, formats such as Letter , Oficio (or Folio ) and Legal are used .
All the technical and formal characteristics of a program television or radio or a periodical is also known as format: "The actress announced that it will participate in a Mexican series with strip format" , "I like radio format magazine ” , “ I think we will have to modify the format of the magazine if we want to attract more sponsors ” .
For computing , a format is a certain structure that allows a computer to convert information to binary code and vice versa. Some popular formats are JPEG (image), AVI (video), and DOC (text file).
In recent years, content in digital format has gained more and more weight, which is opposed to physical items, generally recorded on DVDs or Blu-rays. However, this transition from the physical to the digital is not appreciated with the same force in all areas; Although it is possible to assure that 99% of the video games that are created today have a downloadable version (many times, exclusively), the same does not happen with movies, for example.
The reasons for this difference are not in the space required to store the content, since current generation games usually exceed 10 GB (gigabytes), and it is increasingly common for their weight to be around 45 GB . The fundamental variable of this phenomenon is the public: video game consumers are often seduced by technological advances and, although a large percentage of them do not want to lose physical contact with their favorite games, certain technical advantages of the digital format push them to leap.

One of the strengths of the distribution of video games in digital format is the energy savings it entails, since it avoids the operation of the disk reader and the motor that makes them spin, with the heat that this generates in the console and the computer. consequent need for refrigeration; Of course, this difference occurs if the storage medium has flash memory technology, since hard drives also have mechanical parts.
On the other hand, the local memory storage of a video game usually accelerates the reading speed and improves its performance , although this depends on the technology used. It is worth mentioning that no matter how much convenience it offers, the digital format requires a monetary investment to buy discs or cards to store the products and if the price of the downloadable alternative is not significantly lower than that of the physical version, then its advantages are less tempting for consumers.