What's the difference between Optical Zoom and Digital Zoom in digital cameras?

Question

I know, Optical zoom is the one comes out of the camera and digital zoom doesn't. But other than that how are they diffrent which one do you recommend when I am thinking about buying a
5megapixel 5X digital zoom. or 5.1 Mega pixel w/ 3x Optical zoom.
the one with digital zoom is lik $119 and Optical zoom is 150
I am going to be using this camera for mostly family pictures and trips.

Answer 1

Optical Zoom is good- it's actually changing the focal length of the lens elements to zoom in.

Digital zoom is crappy- it's like having a picture on a TV screen and taking a smaller piece of it to zoom in- so your'e just enlarging it and magifying the pixels, not getting any better detail.

Answer 2

Optical Zoom vs. Digital Zoom
Digital zoom was invented with the digital camera, and is really just pre-cropping. When you use digital zoom you are really just lowering the resolution of your image by telling the camera to disregard the information at the edge of the picture you are taking. Optical zoom uses the lens to "bring the image closer", and doesn't change the resolution of the picture when its taken. It is not to say that digital zoom is all bad, if it helps you see and catch a moving object that is far away at the right moment, then by all means use it. However, if you are taking a still photo of mountains you are better off just cropping it at home on your computer, you will have more image to play with, and more control on how you use it.

Answer 3

Optical zoom is magnification of the image by the lens of the camera. There is no loss of resolution doing this. It's legitimate zoom.

Digital zoom is simply the camera blowing up the image to a larger size and then cropping out the outer parts of the image. There is massive loss of resolution.

Optical zoom is desireable in a camera. Digital zoom is not. However, judicious use of digital zoom on a camera to augment optical zoom does have some use depending on how high a resolution you have on your camera. For example, my Sony DSC-R1 is a 10 megapixel camera. Although it has plenty of optical zoom, if I decide to say, double it using 2X digital zoom, I get quite a close up (at the expense of HALF my resolution). For a standard size print, cutting my resolution down from 10 megapixels to 5 megapixels is quite acceptable, for the most part.

However, at only 5 megapixels, cutting that down to 1 megapixel using a 5X digital zoom will produce....unacceptable results.

Answer 4

Optical zoom is when the lens actually moves, it's a physical mechanism. Digital zoomed is when the image is made large by software but the resolution is not increase, so the image starts getting little squares.

Optical zoom is the best, because effectively the resolution stays the same when the picture is magnified.

Answer 5

Optical zoom ofcourse the difference is that Optical zoom is like binocular which does not effect the quality of the photograph you are taking it changest he lense inside to zoom but the digital zoom basically increases the pixel of the image which does effect the quality of your photo like you zoom a photo in adobe photo shop software. But as an addition it could be handy as well. These days all optical zoom cameras got addtional digital zoom feature.