Optical zoom or digital zoom for digiscoping (1 Viewer)

Hi; I am a newbee trying to obtain knowledge in digiscoping. I know there is optical and digital zooms, and for digiscoping should be 4x or below. I read, heard somewhere that you should turn off the digital zoom and only use the optical zoom. Is this true? Do simple point and shoot cameras have the option to turn off the digital zoom? Hopefully, these questions don't sound to elementary my camera knowledge is limited. Bob

Bob, there's not much point to digital zoom except perhaps as a manual focusing aid. No camera forces you to use it and it's usually best ignored. Optical zoom on the other hand can be extremely useful. It's true though that most digiscope-friendly compacts tend to have optical zooms limited to 3 or 4x (5x in some cases). As a rule, anything higher than that seems to necessitate a lens design which makes it prone to vignetting when coupled to an eyepiece.

David