what is the difference between Digital Zoom & Optical Zoom ?

Question

What is the difference between Digital Zoom & Optical Zoom in digital cameras ??

Answer 1

Optical zoom lenses physically extend to magnify your subject. A motor controls the lens movement. When you press the switch to "W" or "T," the subject is either magnified or reduced in size. The "W" stands for "wide-angle" (reduce). The "T" stands for "telephoto" (magnify).



Digital zoom crops your image and magnifies the result of the cropping. This magnification process is called interpolation. To make the cropped area bigger, digital zoom makes up, or interpolates, pixels to add to the image, which may give less than satisfactory results.



Using the digital zoom allows you to get closer to your subject when you want to be discreet about taking pictures, like at a graduation or a religious ceremony. Sacrificing image quality to capture the moment is more important than not getting the picture at all.

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Answer 2

Optical zoom uses the actual lens to magnify whatever you're viewing. You will rarely have and decrease in image quality with a good lens. Digital zoom is nothing more than software enlargement of the image, and eventually, you'll zoom enough to pixel-late the image. The digital zoom is pretty useless for anything the will be printed.

Answer 3

Best advice is don't ever use the digital zoom. Its totally useless because its not zoom at all. All it does is enlarge the pixels. Just shoot with maximum optical zoom you got and you can do quality cropping and enlarging on pc later on.

Answer 4

Optical zoom means that the lens itself is able to zoom into the scene. Digital zoom isn't "really zooming", it just crops the image (and therefore lowers the image quality, and is much cheaper to implement).

Answer 5

digital zoom means it captures image and than use pixels to enlarge the image, in optical image is zoomed by lenses which gives far better results