Why don Canon make cameras with better optical zoom?
It seems to me that the megapixel count and the optical zoom count are being upped mostly for the marketing departments. These things are used as benchmark numbers that anyone can understand. More means better. Except… that´s not always true. With megapixels, consumer grade lenses only resolve about 8 megapixels worth of information. So a 10 megapixel sensor behind a cheap lens is wasted. It can even HURT performance, because more megapixels on a tiny sensor means that the photosites become smaller and this creates more noise at high ISO. With optical zoom, we´ve gone from 8x zoom to 10x, then models like the Canon S3 have 12x, and the new Olympus SP550 UZ has a whopping 18x optical zoom. But again, more is NOT always better. Read the review for the Olympus. You pay a price in terms of image quality, low light sensitivity, and auto-focus performance. If you look at professional quality zoom lenses for dSLR cameras, they cost +$1000 each and they have 3x zoom TOPS. 17-55mm, 70-200mm,
