To Zoom or Not to Zoom – that is the question

Every now and then Jenn and I are bringing back really great posts from Jenn’s design blog ScrapKitty Design. Here’s one:

In my last post I touched briefly on optical zoom as being a more important consideration when looking for a new digital camera than resolution. After a few questions and comments, I thought I would discuss this important feature of your digital camera.

Okay – everybody knows what zoom is – the ability to enlarge what you are seeing in your digital camera to make it seem like you are closer to your subject. Whether you zoom in because you physically can’t get closer to your subject or you just don’t want to walk closer, zooms are great for digiscrappers to get a perfect shot – one that fills your picture with good detail of what you are photographing without having a lot of useless stuff to crop out.

Here’s the critical part – There are two ways to make a camera zoom. Build a lens (optical zoom) into the camera that increase the magnification (this adds cost and weight) or write software that crops the picture (digital zoom). Digital zoom takes an part of the picture and blows it up to the original size – thereby dropping the quality significantly. It can make the picture blurry and pixelated (blocky looking). It’s just like you taking a picture in Photoshop Elements or Photoshop and cropping it – but the camera does it behind your back!

Here’s an example: Jenn took this picture of my eye; first by moving close and just using the optical zoom and then moving further away and zooming to get the same picture. Look how bad the quality gets using that digital zoom:

The sad part is some digital camera manufacturers are playing a numbers game – combining the optical zoom and digital zoom to get a high zoom number. For example our old digital camera was a 12x zoom – that’s pretty good! However, it was 3x optical and 4x digital (3 x 4 to get the 12). It really only zoomed up 3x before the quality started dropping off a lot. Sometimes you have to really search the camera’s info to find these numbers too. So how much should you get? A 3x optical zoom seems to be pretty standard on most cameras; 4x is better. (Added for this post – I’m seeing a lot of 5x, 10x and 12x as standard.) Our current camera (Canon Powershot S3 IS) is a 12x optical 48x total zoom. And that 12x is nice! Remember too that it is always best to move closer to your subject if you can as the more you zoom the steadier you have to hold the camera.

Just remember to always look for the optical zoom number and you’ll get good, quality pictures to share with friends and family!

Until next week – keep snappin’

Other posts you will enjoy:

1. Foto Friday – How to Get Clearer Pictures Aren’t digital cameras great? I got serious about photography when I was a teenager back in the dark ages of the 1970′s. Then I had my trusty Kodak Instamatic camera and photographed everything I could think...
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3. Foto Friday – Forget Megapixel – Try a Gigapan You might think this a nice panoramic: But you would be wrong! This is actually 220 separate pictures stitched together into one panoramic. Check out the detail you can get: (Yes, it’s zoomed up from the...
4. Foto Friday – A virtual camera I just found the coolest thing! One of the biggest questions we get teaching digital photography is all about f/stops (aperture) and shutter speeds. These basic concepts, along with the ISO speed, form the basis of...
5. Foto Friday – Sometimes size does matter… I was surfing around the internet and came across this great nature photography site –...