Working With Digital Zoom

For years, I have heard warnings about the poor quality of photos taken by small point-and-shoot cameras that have digital zooms. Critics would say that they never use that feature because it would mean giving up the quality that only an optical lens could provide. That made sense to me, so I seldom used the digital zoom on my old Canon G9 camera. My larger cameras don’t have digital zooms.

 

I got curious yesterday, though, and decided to test out the quality of the digital zoom feature on my Canon G1X. I set up a subject, put the camera on a tripod, and zoomed the digital zoom lens out to its maximum length, filling the frame. It provides a 16X magnification.

 

Then I turned off the digital zoom and took the second photo using only the optical zoom lens. My camera only has a 4X optical zoom, not too impressive.

Finally, I made a copy of that second shot and cropped it to match the first one. In this way, I could compare the digital and optical versions. I thought it might be possible that the pure optical version could be blown up to equal, or even to surpass, the digital zoom version. But it didn’t work out that way. The digital zoom version, while not perfect, was considerably better than the cropped, range-limited optical zoom image.

The test shows that there’s no need to be afraid to use a digital zoom when you need the added range. If you have a compact camera with this feature, why not make a test and see for yourself?