Most people who have used a 35mm camera or an APS camera are aware of only optical zoom. Digital zoom is an invention of digital video camera. It is not uncommon to see digital videocams with 300x digital zoom. For our purpose, digital zoom is not really zoom, in the strictest definition of the term. What digital zoom does is enlarge a portion of the image, thus simulating optical zoom. In other words, the camera crops a portion of the image and then enlarges it back to size. In so doing, you lose image quality. If youve been regularly using digital zoom and wondered why your pictures did not look that great, now you know.

So, as far as digital zoom is concerned, you can do it in camera or you can do it afterwards in an image editing software. Any cropping and enlarging can be done in an image editing software, such as Photoshop. So, when a digital camera is advertised with 3x digital zoom, no big deal. If you do it in camera, image quality is irreversibly lost. Someone in a digital camera forum once mentioned that he uses digital zoom because it might mean the difference between capturing a great shot or not at all. Umm, lets think about this a bit. True, if by zooming digitally in camera you get to see what your subject is doing and thus can capture the shot at the right moment. So, its really up to you, if you know what youre doing.

Here it is: Always use optical zoom. If you do use digital zoom, use it only if it does not appreciably impact your image quality. If you rarely print past 4x6 in. When comparing cameras, you should always use optical zoom. There is no point in comparing digital zoom with digital zoom or optical zoom with total zoom.

Always compare optical zoom with optical zoom. Resolution What about optical zoom vs. Now yall know that we cannot and should not be comparing apples n oranges, but we still try.

The megapixels resolution of a digital camera can be thought of as the number of pixels available to capture an image.

With a 2 megapixels camera, you have 2 million pixels to record an image. Whether you zoom or not does not affect how many pixels are used to capture the image. So, zoomed at its maximum, a 2 megapixels 3x optical zoom digital camera will still have captured a 2 million pixels image. Likewise, a 3 megapixels 2x optical zoom digital camera will always capture a 3 million pixels image. With a 2 megapixels digital camera, you can make good 4x6 in. With a 3 megapixels digital camera, you can make good 8x10 in. So, as far as image quality is concerned, the 3 megapixels camera is better. Unless you are always going to take pictures at max. 3MP camera is better because at 2x optical zoom and less, it is always capturing images with more detail than the 2MP camera. What we are really trying to say is this: do not compare. If the answer is both, then find a digital camera that has both.

If its outside your pocketbook range, then choose a digital camera for what is more important to you.