Digital Zoom (1 Viewer)

I will be purchasing my C750 this afternoon (or tomorrow afternoon), however there is one thing that i'm slightly unclear about.

I have been advised to stay clear of the digital zoom for taking distant shots, why is this? Is it because of a serious cost to image quality?


Regards

Simon

Yes, I have the 730 Olympus digital zoom and apart from record shots very rarely bother with the digital zoom.

Having said that I have achieved excellent results with the 10x zoom and the super macro function is a dream.

I never use the digital zoom on my CP 4500. All digital zoom does is enlarge part of the image. I have found better results (if I needed to do it) with optical zoom and then "blowing up" in Photoshop.

Essentially, it is because "digital zoom" is an oxymoron. You can't get more detail out of the camera than the detail going into it. "2X Digital zoom", for example, simply takes each dot and records two of them. The result is that you get a larger, lower-resolution picture. You could do exactly the same thing by simply taking a crop out of an un-"zoomed" picture and enlarging it on your computer. In fact, you would probably get better results doing it that way, because your computer has vastly more processing power than any camera can hope to have, and this means that your photo-viewing software can (hopefully) do a better job of the zooming.

The short rule is: optical zoom good, digital zoom, bad.

I don't know about the Olympus, but my Nikon allows me to switch the digital "zoom" off so that when I reach the limit of optical zoom (4X in my CP4500), I can't accidently go any further.

That's great, thanks for your responses....

I have no reason to use the digital zoom in that case, if I need to "blow up" the image I will do it PS6.

Thanks again

Simon