Digital Zoom is a Scam

Cameras advertise that they have 15x digital zoom, which means absolutely nothing! All digital zoom does is enable the camera to blow up the picture and crop the edges. You can do the same using photo editing software on your computer or even through some print providers. (I’ll also cover this later). They say this is a big feature, and even advertise the camera as having tons of zoom. Don't fall for it. Let me show you the difference between optical zoom and digital zoom.

Here are some examples of optical zoom I stood in the same place and took pictures of this water bottle.

This image with 1x optical zoom:



This image is 3x optical zoom:



This is "real" zoom. You can notice that with the 3x optical zoom, the image is still sharp and clean. This is because it contains the same number of pixels as the 1x optical zoom.

Now, this is an example of digital digital zoom. I used the digital zoom on the camera and went to 15x:



You can see in the image, that it has lost some of its sharpness. Look under the red band of the label and you will see some jagged edges, as well as the lettering in crystal. The interesting thing is that I can produce the exact same image with the exact same sharpness by just using a crop tool on my desktop:



This picture just a crop of the picture above from 3x OPTICAL zoom. Notice how is just as sharp as the 15x digital zoom.


Please, don't be fooled by digital zoom!