What's the difference between optical zoom and digital zoom?
What's the difference? If a camera has 12x optical zoom, and 4x digital zoom with 8.0 megapixelss is that a good camera for the price of $350?
It's a Canon PowerShot S5 IS
Ignore digital zoom when evaluating cameras, all it does is make lousy pictures. Optical zoom measures how much the lens can magnify your image. To use your example, a 12x optical zoom has a 12:1 zoom ratio. That means at the telephoto end, it has 12 times the magnification it has at the wide angle end. Digital zoom simply takes the pixels in the middle of your photograph and magnifies them, effectively making your 18 Megapixel camera into a five or six Megapixel camera. Shoot with optical zoom only. If you really need to magnify the center of your image, you can do it later with any picture editing software and get a better result.
As to whether $350 is a good price... probably, but you don't say what model it is. Assuming it's a name brand camera, I'd say $350 is a good price.
Shoot the Moon! Sony HDR-SR11 Digital Zoom Test
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£11.50
