What is the difference between digital & optical zoom?

I am shopping for a digital camera, and would like to know what the difference in the zoom types are. I am only familiar with manual SLR cameras.

Optical zoom is the only real kind of zoom. For optical, the actual lens changes to catch different amounts of light, and gets higher resolution on the area you are interested in.

Digital zoom does the same thing you would do in any editing program. In that, the camera selects a small part of the picture and multiplies the size of the pixels by the necessary scale factor to make it the same size as the original. Digital zoom does not collect any extra data from the light, and so the picture quality gets worse the closer you zoom in.

thank you for the info-I almost bought a camera that had 2x optical and 6x digital or something like that. Report It

Digital zoom always not clear because zoom to the image, but optical zoom is clear because VIA lenses.

Good Luck.

optical zoom is actually the amount of zoom caused by the lens moving out and in. digital zoom is BS - it's no different than pushing "zoom in" on your computer. it can get you "closer" but you'll sacrifice picture quality - it'll get pixellated.

If you want to focus on far-away things, get the most optical zoom you can find.

optical zoom uses the lenses to zoom in on your object like any regular film camera's zoom. digital zoom actually takes the image and lowers the resolution thereby allowing the illusion of zooming. too high digital zoom and your picture will become grainy and blurry.. stay with optical or low digital zoom

Optical zoom is where a lens or lenses are moved in and out to cause the target to become closer or further away visually

digital zoom, which usually only occurs after optical has been exceeded, is where the software in the camera attempts to enlarge the image of what is currently being targeted.

Get the best camera you can afford with the highest possible optical zoom.

the optical is the zoom that ur lenses can get....and the digital y when the image ur camera see is further than the optical..is like a image created by the cam

Optical Zoom is the zoom that get by positioning the lens in the particular position in your lens house. Means that the picture that camera get by optical zoom is the natural picture that it get. Meanwhile, digital zoom is only effect from computer, like you open a picture in your computer, and zoom it, so its not natural.

^_^ cheers.

Count on the optical zoom and forget about the digital zoom. You can do as well or better in Photoshop (or whatever) when you work with your image on the computer. Optical zoom is all you have ever had on your manual SLR cameras, so you are already familiar with that.