What does Digital and Optical zoom mean?
Camcorders come with a zoom lens that lets you get closer to your subject. Don’t get confused with digital and optical zoom as the difference is considerable; optical yields the best results. • Digital zoom uses internal software to enlarge the centre of an image after the optical zoom is fully extended. This causes a drop in clarity as only part of the image is being enlarged. Image quality degrades leading to grainy, blurry looking images. Typically digital zooms range between 300x and 400x. • Optical zoom uses a lens, meaning it magnifies without the loss of picture quality. Most modern camcorders have at least a 10x optical zoom; plenty for general purposes. Some top-end models have 70x optical zoom. To get the best image quality during zooming, optical zoom should be used especially for long range telephoto pictures.
