What is the difference between optical zoom and digital zoom surrounded by a camera?
Answers: Optical zoom is good and digital zoom sucks. Optical zoom is "real" zoom done next to the camera lens. Digital zoom is really just a instrument to enlarge pixels and lower the image. Ignore it completely when you are comparing cameras.
See: http://www.flickr.com/photos/samfeinstei... for one example. The difference is clear. Take entry of the digital noise contained by the so-called digital zoomed print. This is typical. The optical zoomed model is not great, but this is taken with alike point and shoot camera as the other example.
Here are three sample pictures taken next to my Canon Powershot SD900, which is a 10.0 megapixel camera. All three pictures are taken with the optical zoom maxed out at 3X or 23.1 mm, which is the equivalent of 111.6 mm after calculating for the lens crop factor. There is no symbol processing at all done next to any of these pictures. All were taken using the self-timer to (hopefully) wipe out camera shake as the camera sat on the top of my saloon. (Okay, I'll use a tripod next time, but I believe they are pretty sharp images.) Please click on "View All Sizes" and later view respectively image at the largest size available, which should be 3648 x 2736 pixels. The first picture (3xOpticalFull) is the full frame logo at 3x optical zoom, or 111 mm. The second picture (4xDigitalFull) is the result of zooming out the further 4x in digital zoom, for an equivalent of 444 mm. The third picture (3xOpticalCrop) is certainly a cropped version of the productive image, maintain the full pixel dimension. In other words, I accomplished the "digital zoom" entirely contained by the computer and not in the camera. If you compare the full-sized metaphors, I think it is directly obvious that the third picture is far superior within any aspect that you care to examine. I ponder it is much sharper (Check the tower and the antenna up near the top of the frame.), have better color, and less digital resonance and artifact (Check the plain sky and the shadows on the building.). These images are adjectives tagged "digital zoom."
3xOpticalFull: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7189769@N04...
4xDigitalFull: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7189769@N04...
3xOpticalCrop: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7189769@N04...
In other words, please close the eyes to any claims of superiority based on "digital zoom" when you choose your camera. It is single "in camera cropping" and it is not anywhere close as good as "within computer cropping." Any attempts at cropping a digitally-zoomed picture will be a waste of time.
See also, in the order of half-way down this page: http://photo.net/equipment/digital/basic...
The digital zoom simply zooms within the image you're composing- not unlike zoom in on segment of the image when contained by an imaging program. It comes at the price of image talent. Best not to use this feature. Optical zoom in actual fact zooms within on your composition using the optics of the lens. A 3x optical zoom goes from broad angle to telephoto, for example from 28mm to 84mm, etc. A 10x optical zoom would go from 28mm to 280mm.
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