Optical Zoom Vs Digital Zoom
Hello Folks,
Hope you are all doing well. Today I would like to share with you a very common but less understood feature, in digital camera or mobile camera, “Zoom”. Yesterday, like every day, I was waiting for my bus at ‘Sea Face’ bus stop in Mumbai. The bus stop has its own beauty, you can enjoy the view of ‘Bandra-Worli Sea Link’ bridge from there. So naturally, every person who visit that area first time, never stop themselves to capture the magnificent view of the “Bandra-Worli Sea Link”. A person stood just next to me, probably a traveller, was trying to capture the view from his mobile. He tries to zoom as much as possible and captured The ‘Sea Link’. And went with a smile. By seeing that, I thought I should write a note on mobile camera “zoom” because most of the people use “zoom” option without knowing its technical aspect. Though in this article my intension is not dig you into too much of technical details but me thinks that some technical knowledge is important to capture better photograph.
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Zoom on a mobile camera or any digital camera can add to the pleasure of digital photography. However, many consumers are confused between optical and digital zoom. Perhaps the most misleading of all features advertised for digital cameras is the zoom range. An understanding of the difference between the two zooms will help you to improve your photography knowledge.
Optical Zoom :
Optical zoom is the actual zoom in the camera. When you use DSLR camera using any lens attached to it. And you use zoom ring in the lens to zoom into the subject, that is optical zoom. Optical zoom uses the optics (lens) of the camera to bring the subject closer and allows image quality to remain constant throughout the optical zoom range.
Digital Zoom :
Digital zoom is not really a zoom. Digital zoom is simply a software program running in your camera or mobile that enlarges your original image (as if you were zooming in with a real optical zoom lens). What digital zoom does is take a central portion of the image and enlarging it, thus ‘simulating’ optical zoom. In so doing, you lose image quality.
Digital zoom is not really a zoom. Digital zoom is simply a software program running in your camera or mobile that enlarges your original image (as if you were zooming in with a real optical zoom lens). What digital zoom does is take a central portion of the image and enlarging it, thus ‘simulating’ optical zoom. In so doing, you lose image quality.
Digital zoom simply enlarges your original image (as if you are zooming in with a zoom lens like your DSLR camera). But in doing so, you lose the image quality.
Conclusion :
Is digital zoom therefore all bad? No, not at all. It’s a feature that you might want in your mobile camera, especially if you don’t care about using (or don’t know how to use) an image editing software. So, as far as digital zoom is concerned, you can do it in camera or you can do it afterwards in an image editing software. Any cropping and enlarging can be done in an image editing software, such as Photoshop.
