Digital vs. Optical Zoom
Author: Goran Katić
When purchasing a photo or a video camera you want its zoom to be as big as possible. However, you're confused about characteristics like digital and optical zoom. Behind the large numbers and technical terms simple solutions are hiding. One remark, optical and digital zooms ultimately work the same way, and that's enlarging i.e. making the object you want to photograph/videotape appear closer.
A photograph shot with a digital zoom, notice the breakdown of the photograph.In the optical zoom, lens is the one which displays image in the camera, and you get a 'real' photograph. As for a digital zoom, computer enlarges the image and makes a new one – which means; using software computer makes and places nonexistent pixels where there is lack of them on the image. Mostly, those kinds of photographs turn out unsharp and have lower quality then the ones taken with optical zoom.
A photograph taken with a standard optical zoom.All cameras today have digital zooms, some with numbers like 100, 200 even 300. Such numbers don't mean the camera is no good; those characteristics i.e. large numbers are there more for the advertisement. It depends on your wish to use a digital zoom which works to a certain extent. If you overuse it, though, you won't get any results and at the end you won't have usable photograph or a video shot. All those kind of enlargements you can get later in graphic programs where the results will, surely, be better.
