What is the point of digital zoom?

I mean, why do they even include such a useless feature. When you do use it you end up with blurry smudgy images. And going a little farther, why would you even need digital zoom on a camera that has 10x optical zoom, honestly, when you have THAT much zoom, the point of digital zoom becomes, kind of pointless.

Yes, I have a 10x optical zoom (Nikon S4).

Perhaps, but I demand perfect image quality.

The point of digital zoom is marketing. Nothing more. They include it to make you think that you 'really' have 12X zoom with 3x optical and 4x digital. it's bogus and based on your question, you knew that. Everything that you can do with digital zoom you can do with software after it comes out of your camera.

I think you're being too hard on digital zoom. It's not the feature you really want on your cam but it can be helpful sometimes.

But not all digital cameras are designed with lenses capable of 10x zoom, many only manage 4x optically.

True, the eventual lack of quality with a lot of digital zooming features makes them more of a selling point, but not really useful to the true photographer.

Still, the common casual user isn't worried one way or the other.

close up. u can restore foto quality by some gud after-processing softwares

No point, except you can "see" closer in the LCD of the object you are trying to shoot. Agreed with all the comments above. You can "zoom in" on your computer after you download.

Someone said it allows you to get closer - you can clean the image with good processing software.

True, but digital zoom is doing the same thing you are doing when you go into photoshop and resize your image to a larger size...so... someone who has no digital zoom can still take the same image and upsample slightly, run it through whatever processing software they want and get the same result...

So I agree with other comments that digital zoom is pure marketing...it adds nothing to the camera's feature.

Only if someone is a true computer-phobic (and then they shouldn't have a digital camera), then they probably would rather zoom the image digitally in camera instead of photoshop, but even then, if you don't process your image, make sure you don't digitally zoom much or the quality will just be too degraded,