Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I have customers ask me all the time what digital zoom is? I know about optical but was never versed on digital.
Thanx for any info.

The difference between the two is that optical zoom is the zoom performed by the lens, and is truely a zoom. The digital zoom is simply a crop of the photo, that the cameras processor interpulates to create a full size image..

Basically, it takes a small section of a photo and stretches it.. then adds pixels to the empty spots created by the stretch, it takes a guess at what color the pixels should be, based on mathmatical principles.. You will drop some picture quality with it (how much depends on the digital zoom power, and how good the interpulation is).

The optical zoom will work when it can, but when the operator zooms beyond the reach of the lens strength, the digital zoom will kick in. (nost have an option within the camera to turn the feature off, so it will only zoom within the limitations of the glass.

It would be ok for a person looking for snap shots that may occassionally need a little extra boost.. If someone will primarily be using the camera at the far end of the zoom, they would be much better served to get one with better glass.
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photos.xtremecombatsports.com

Tim gave a good description of digital zoom. I would just add that it's something you could just as easily do with a photo editor afterwards. The difference is that the camera can do it before compressing which SHOULD make for somewhat better quality.

Speaking as a programmer (but not much of a photographer), my opinion is that digital zoom is of questionable use to start with and anything more than 2 or 3 times over the optical zoom is probably worthless. A camera that has 8X optical zoom and 200X digital zoom is 10X marketing smoke.

Like Tim said, better glass is the most important thing. I'd take a camera with 10X optical and no digital over one with 8X optical and 10,000X digital.