Many digital cameras offer both optical and digital zoom .  These two often confuse the average camera buyer, until you know what you’re looking at.

Optical zoom works much like the zoom lens on a 35 mm film camera. It changes the length of your camera’s lens, draws the subject closer to you.The optical zoom keeps quality of the picture. The digital zooms works differently. It simply take picture and crops it then enlarges the part that is left.  It causes sometimes greatly, the quality of the photo to be reduced.

What this means in terms of output is you may have a larger view of an object with the digital zoom, but chances are your image will become unfocused.  Details will become lost.  It is actually, if possible,  best to turn off the digital zoom feature of your camera.These would prevent you automatically zooming in too close as the digital zoom is often an extension of the optical.

There are a couple of things you can do if you want a closer view of a subject but want the quality of your picture to still be good.Try move in closer when you took the picture.Often just a foot or two will do the trick.  If this isn’t possible, you can set your camera to take a picture at its highest file size.These will result in a photo that could be cropped to include only your desired subject, yet allow for an image that is still clear.

Digital zoom has its place.  It can be used if the only destiny of your photo is the internet.  When sent through e-mail or posted on a web gallery, photos online can be a much lower quality in the camera and still appear acceptable.  However, seek a camera that has a greater optical zoom and turn off the digital zoom, if your goal is printing.Your picture would be better in the end, even if they are not as close up.