What is the difference between load_digits() and fetch_mldata("MNIST Original")

Question

I would like to know the difference between

from sklearn import datasets
dataset = datasets.fetch_mldata("MNIST Original")

and

from sklearn.datasets import load_digits
tempdigits = load_digits()  

How is these two related to MNIST dataset?

Answer 1

sklearn comes with a few small standard datasets that do not require to download any file from some external website. load_digits includes around 1800 samples of size 8X8 from the UCI ML dataset:

http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Optical+Recognition+of+Handwritten+Digits

fetch_mldata downloads the MNist dataset from http://mldata.org/repository/data/viewslug/mnist-original/ which contains 70000 samples of size 28x28 pixels

So basically the datasets downloaded are different.