Digital zoom or optical zoom?

Question

Looking to buy a new digital camera for candid as well as distance shots. To get better quality on distance shots, which is better, more digital zoom or optical? Thanks!

Answer 1

Optical!!!

Digital is something you can effectively do afterwards at home.

Answer 2

For megapixels well OK think of it this way, you could make a picture on a piece of paper simply by using colored pencils and drawing dots. The more dots you draw the more detailed your picture would be. No matter how many dots you drew, you could break the picture down into dots. All you need to know about each dot is what color it is and how hard you pressed the pencil. Computers are as dumb as posts. They cannot draw a line or be in the least bit creative. However they are good at remembering a lot of stuff. So we teach them to remember information about each dot. Being computer nerds we can't simply call them dots, that's not technical enough. So we call them "Picture Elements". Over time that has been abbreviated to simply "Pixel". Each pixel is one dot. Now the more dots we have and the smaller the dots are in a given picture, the better the picture quality will appear to be. As cameras and computers got better, they remembered information about first thousands and then even millions of dots. But being nerds again we can't talk about millions, that's too simple, so we use the prefix "Mega" to mean millions. Therefore a one megapixel camera simply has an image made up of one million dots. Entry level cameras these days tend to record 4 megapixels. Better cameras go up to 8 or even 10 megapixels. The Hasselblad H3D-39 can even record a massive 39 megapixels of data! Now the more dots the better right? Well up to a point. After a while if we are going to print normal sized photos, we reach a point where the printer can't print that many dots and our eyes can't see that many dots, so going bigger is not necessarily better. Specifics vary but this generally happens around the 5 - 6 megapixel mark. So why buy an 8 MP camera, it's a waste of time right? Not necessarily. For two main reasons: 1) More megapixels means bigger prints. Let's say you take that one killer photo that you love, wouldn't it be nice to blow it up to A3 or poster size? 2) Cropping. With an 8 MP camera, you can do a fairly savage crop on your image without losing too much quality. As for zoom. Optical zoom is real, it's where the lens elements move to magnify the image. Digital zoom is where they effectively crop part of the image and expand it to full frame. This results in a poor quality image. This is also nothing you can't do on the computer later yourself, so stay away from digital zoom. So I hope this clears up a little of the mystery for you! All the best with your photography!

Answer 3

Definitely optical zoom! Optical zoom uses the optic lens versus the digital zoom which only enlarges part of the part of the image. This means that digital zoom simulates the optical zoom. Optical zoom will give you a truer shot. Choose a camera that tells you when you're using optical zoom and digital zoom. Using digital zoom will affect the quality of your image.

Best wishe!

Answer 4

Optical zoom is far better. The digital zoom is just a digital enhancement of the optical image. It's like zooming in on a digital image in a photo editing program and the increased pixelization greatly detracts from the quality of the image.

For all intents and purposes of photography, digital zoom is useless.

Answer 5

Optical zoom is good and digital zoom sucks. Optical zoom is "real" zoom done with the camera lens. Digital zoom is really just a way to enlarge pixels and degrade the image. Ignore it completely when you are comparing cameras.

Here are three sample pictures taken with 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 image processing at all done with any of these pictures. All were taken using the self-timer to (hopefully) eliminate camera shake as the camera sat on the top of my car. (Okay, I'll use a tripod next time, but I think they are pretty sharp images.) Please click on "View All Sizes" and then view each image at the largest size available, which should be 3648 x 2736 pixels. The first picture (3xOpticalFull) is the full frame image at 3x optical zoom, or 111 mm. The second picture (4xDigitalFull) is the result of zooming out the additional 4x in digital zoom, for an equivalent of 444 mm. The third picture (3xOpticalCrop) is actually a cropped version of the original image, maintaining the full pixel dimension. In other words, I accomplished the "digital zoom" entirely in the computer and not in the camera. If you compare the full-sized images, I think it is immediately obvious that the third picture is far superior in any aspect that you care to examine. I think it is much sharper (Check the tower and the antenna up near the top of the frame.), has better color, and less digital noise and artifact (Check the plain sky and the shadows on the building.). These images are all tagged "digital zoom."

3xOpticalFull: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7189769@N04/459603923/
4xDigitalFull: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7189769@N04/459603931/
3xOpticalCrop: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7189769@N04/459603939/

In other words, please ignore any claims of superiority based on "digital zoom" when you choose your camera. It is only "in camera cropping" and it is not anywhere near as good as "in computer cropping." Any attempts at cropping a digitally-zoomed picture will be a waste of time.

Answer 6

I'll Keep it simple,
Look at optical zoom. You do not lose clarity by zooming with optical zoom. Digital on the other hand, loses clarity as you zoom in.

Answer 7

Digital zoom takes what you have and expands it, reducing the resolution as you zoom. For example, a 6mp camera, digitally zoomed 3x, gives you 2mp pictures.
Optical zoom brings you closer to the subject without reducing quality. 6mp pictures remain 6mp.

Digital zoom sweater: Too small? Just streeeeeeetch it over yourself. (ouch!)

Optical zoom sweater: Too small? Put it back and get a larger one that fits. (nice!)

Hope this is helpful.

Answer 8

Optical is always better. Highest optical zoom you can afford, if you are thinking you can't afford a very good one be sure to buy a camera that allows you to change lenses.

Answer 9

never look at digital zoom (that is the bad one)

always look at optical zoom

Answer 10

Optical.