They work right out of the box. You'll need to run through the menus and apply the settings for the type of picture your are shooting. But thats just selecting options. Are you buying an SLR or point and shoot?

Point and shoot. The easier the better as far as I'm concerned. It's an Olympus.

One of the default settings you may want to change is picture size. My camera was set at 3072 x 2304 initially and that eats up about 2 mb of the memory card for each shot. It also has enough pixels to create large wall posters - not what I needed.

I found a setting of 1024 x 768 was fine for my purposes. That uses about 250 - 350 kb per shot.

The link has a chart that explains it better.

Here is a link that might be useful: How big can I print my photos