Digital Camera Zoom

Optical vs. Digital Zoom

With zoom you can switch between close up and a faraway point. There is a very important thing to think about when buying a camera and that is the difference between optical and digital zoom.

Optical zoom measures the ability of the camera's lens and other parts to capture more light, and more detail, from a particular faraway point. That means that you get better-quality pictures taken from a distance while digital zoom works by capturing only the central portion of the entire image received by the sensor. It basically means that the digital zoom is really only a cropping tool, since it cuts off the parts of the image that would be out of the field of view if a longer focal length lens had been used.



As optical zoom is much better and more clear don't get fooled with advertisements of digital zooms, it's the optical zoom you should be watching.

I usually recommend that digital photographers ignore the digital zoom feature entirely.


Here's why: Optical zoom uses the actual lenses to zoom in and out of a scene. Digital zoom, though, simply enlarges the pixels in the middle of the picture electronically and throws away the pixels around the edges. So digital zoom is essentially the same thing as cropping a picture in an image editing program.

You can usually disable the digital zoom feature by setting an option in the camera's menu, and that's what I do. Recently, a reader suggested one good use for digital zoom: You can crop your pictures "in the camera" so you can print without connecting the camera to a computer.

Posted in: Camera, Digital, Digital Zoom, Optical zoom, zoom