Digital Zoom

zoom camera advertising and product specification will talk about optical and digital zoom. However, these are very different terms and can be misleading unless you understand what each of them means.

Digital Zoom

Digital zoom does not move you closer to the subject. What happens is the digital technology crops the image, and then digitally enlarges the portion you want to zoom in on to fill the viewfinder. This means that the number of pixels in the enlarged image stays the same as the number of pixels in the small portion you want to zoom in on. So by spreading out the number of pixels in this way results in a loss of quality, and is no different than cropping and enlarging an image with editing software. The benefit of using image-editing software instead of the digital zoom on a zoom camera is that you can decide how much to crop, and how much to enlarge the image to where the quality is acceptable to you. When you use digital zoom on the zoom camera, the image quality is irreversibly lost.

However, digital zoom does enable you to see a portion of your image close up before you take the picture, which would otherwise not be possible until downloading to image-editing software. Also, you may not wish to get involved in image-editing software and if you do not intend to print out and enlarge your images then the loss of quality is barely noticeable. It is just a question of understanding the limitations and matching the optical and digital zoom ratings to suit your style and aspirations in terms of digital photography.

Visit our Optical Zoom page for an explanation of that term.

Example of loss of quality from digital zoom.

Each zoom camera featured on this site has a combination of optical and digital zoom which significantly increases their zoom capability. Click on the image below to see a detailed description and full technical details for each zoom camera together with latest prices.

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