When a Digital Zoom is Needed

Youve been told that you should disregard claims of large digital zoom ratios and have been warned that to usea digital zoom is to ruin the picture with visible artifacts and pixels. To a certain extent, these statements are true but they dont tell the whole story.

Digital cameras that feature an optical zoom and a digital zoom offer the option of using one or the other or even both together. An optical zoom lens of 28 to 200 mm may not be enough in some situations. This is where the digital zoom comes in handy.

Say you are at a football game and want to get a close up of your son in action. A 200mm lens setting would probably include three or four football players in the scene, making it difficult to recognize faces. A two times digital zoom makes the focal length 400 mm, cropping the scene into a two football player picture. A four X digital zoom setting will garner a head and shoulder close up of one football player.

At two X digital zoom, the number of pixels are cut in half but digital processing and interpolating between pixels will smooth out the image with very little loss in quality. If your digital camera starts out with 8MB of pixels, the final result of 4MB will still enlarge to over eight by ten size without losing quality. At four X digital zoom, the pixels are reduced to 2MB which will visibly degrade the image somewhat. This sacrifice in quality is often acceptable if you capture a fantastic shot of action.

Other subjects that would benefit from the use of the digital zoom are bird photography, wild animal photography, candid people shots and sport events of all kinds. While most photographic images are covered with the normal optical zoom range, sometimes the digital zoom can save the day.

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