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:

Optical zoom 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. 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!

Happy Scrapping and A great holiday!

Stan, The DaddyKitty