Digital zoom

[snake]

I have been playing about with the zoom settings on my camera.
I have a max of 400mm with the optical zoom and if I press the digital zoom button it becomes 800mm.
The image from the digital zoom is not as good but I only sharpen them in Picasa. Maybe they could be cleaned up with a good quality photo editing package.
Does anyone really use digital zoom?

[big bill]

Hello Snake nice set of pics well done myself cannot see differance maybe a bit of lost detail in images 2 & 3 but not much as I dont use this type of camera ,I think I did read somewere though that digital zoom was not very good as all it does is crop the image and interploate it ,I am ready to stand corrected if this is not right ,but your images are fine as far as I can see well done .Image 1 ihas more detail than the other 2 though

[diggleken]

My last camera, a small Canon, was 4 megapixels, 3x optical and 4x digital zoom, giving 12x max, which was poor quality, thus only rarely used for distant ''emergencies''.
My new small Canon is 8 megapixels , 6x optical and 4x digital, giving 24x max, but now also has a much better image stabilizer.
Because of sharper images from the greater pixels and image stability, I can shoot at 24x and get much better results than before, so i guess these two factors are crucial to zooming up into the digital zone.
That said, I stay on optical most of the time!
This Jay was shot handheld at 24x, so blurred but with a tripod should give quite good results!

Cheers
Ken

[Blackbrook Eye]

Hi snake, big bill is correct regarding digital zoom, it is generally regarded as a better option, if you require more magnification, to use the optical zoom on the camera and then crop the image at the editing stage, something picassa is perfectly capable of doing. As to the difference in actual fact, there seems to be little to choose between the two methods, there is still no substitute for getting closer to the subject in the first place and I reallise that this is not always easy.

Keith

[dan-fisher]

I've always belived it's best to just use the optical on your camera, then do all the cropping with the better software on the pc.

[Geoff F]

As others have already said, the best quality enlargement comes from using optical zoom plus crop and enlarge on a computer. It is basically the same thing but this way you are in charge of the process.

For best results, don't enlarge more than 50% in one go. Use 2 stages to get to 100%. If you have it, use something called BiCubic Interpolation when doing substantial resizing (it fills in the gaps in your enlarged image). With some software this may just be called Best Quality.

After resizing try a little bit of Unsharp Mask to sharpen the image, but don't overdo it.

Also keep a watch on image resolution. This can get a bit technical so I will just say select the best resolution for your use, ie 96 pixels per inch for internet use but a lot more for printing.

300ppi is often recommended for printing but with many papers and printers you can get away with a lot less, but not below 150ppi. This can mean that it is better to print at say 200ppi than to do an extra resize to get to 300ppi.