Digital cameras have revolutionized how we take photos and the camera industry and the camera market have taken advantage of this opportunity by developing digital cameras. Moreover there are thousands of sites which deal with digital cameras and offer discounts.

Digital Photography Tutorial to Find Best Digital Cameras Online

What is zoom?

There are two types of zoom – optical and digital (in older film cameras the only zoom option was optical).

Optical zoom works by physically moving the camera’s lenses and changing the focal length. You run the digital zoom software and choose a 2X zoom. To accomplish this zoom the camera crops half of the photo and enlarges the other half to create a 2X zoom effect. The result is a photo with a quality equivalent to a 1MP photo.

Digital zoom significantly reduces the quality of the photo. If your camera does not include digital zoom you can always shoot the photo without zooming and then use a PC photo editing software to crop a portion of it and enlarge the rest.

Optical zoom is superior to digital zoom. It is always better to apply digital zoom on a PC at a later time rather then when taking the photo using the camera’s built-in digital zoom.

Know your camera’s zoom

Some manufacturers claim the maximum zoom figure their cameras support without specifying if it is optical or digital zoom. For example if a camera supports a 5X optical zoom and 10X digital zoom advertising the camera as a “10X zoom camera” is confusing – 10X digital zoom can be done with any camera using simple PC software.