Digital Zoom vs Optical Zoom
Many people have emailed me and asked about digital zoom vs optical zoom. Which is best and why are there two kinds of zoom? Sometimes they even sell digital cameras without a zoom lens and market it as 3x digital zoom. I think this is very misleading since I don’t consider digital zoom to be a real zoom.
So what is the difference between digital zoom and optical zoom? A digital zoom is a faked lens as it doesn’t really exist physically. If you have used any image software on your computer you have noticed that you can zoom in an image with the magnifier icon. This is exactly what the digital zoom does. You will also notice that the quality of the image gets worse when you use the digital zoom or the magnifier on the computer. The more megapixels your camera has, the less quality you lose when using digital zoom. Today even cheap digital cameras come with a digital zoom and it cost almost nothing for the manufacturer to add a digital zoom to the camera. An optical zoom is a lot more expensive to add. Yet a lot of marketers push the fact that the camera has a digital zoom, but I think you should completely ignore this. Even if the camera has a digital zoom you should never ever use it. You might as well take the photo without zoom and zoom it on the computer later if you feel it’s needed.
So the conclusion of this is that you should forget about digital zoom and focus on optical zoom. The optical zoom uses the lens instead. This type of magnification is a true zoom and doesn’t affect the quality of the image. Smaller digital cameras usually come with a 3x optical zoom and I think this is the minimum for a digital camera today. I hope this have cleared up all your questions about digital zoom vs optical zoom.