How well does the Digital Zoom effect work?
Very well! As well as it can, anyway. That is, it does a good job of zooming in on the pixels, but it doesn’t magically reveal any detail in the image. It’s identical to what you would get if you saved the telephoto image, and then used Adobe Photoshop to blow up the middle of the picture 200%. Here’s an example of exactly that. Start with the reference image This is a wide-angle photo along a San Diego canyon. Then we zoom in to the full optical telephoto limits. That’s all the data there is to go around. Last, we turn on the LCD Preview, which lets us zoom digitally up to 200%. It’s much softer than the original, but I can imagine where it would come in handy. Just for fun, I did the same thing in Photoshop. Starting with the full telephoto image, I used the “Bicubic” image resampling to blow it up 200%. Then I reduced the canvas 50% to crop it back to the center portion. The resulting image is almost exactly like the one generated inside the camera, and it was a lot more work. That’
