The new era of digital cameras opened new horizons and opportunities for almost everybody to be able to make great photos.

One of the most important things in the modern cameras that I appreciate a lot is the digital camera zoom. It’s very interesting how the camera zoom captures the details that you can’t even see with your own eyes.

When buying a camera, you should make sure you’re buying a good product for a good price. You can easily get confused in the store, if you don’t have enough information.

You most likely have noticed that the lens is described either as 3x or 6x in the description of the camera’s functions. The bigger the number is, the better enlarging capability the camera has. But you should keep in mind that a camera with 3x zoom can be of better quality than another camera having the same 3x zoom.

Digital cameras have two zoom configurations: digital and optical. They are different from each other, and if you have any plans on becoming a professional photographer, you should have some basic information about both of them. Although I’m pretty sure that you’ll need only the optical zoom.

The optical zoom measures the increase of the focal length (the distance between the lens and the image sensor) of the lens. When you use the optical zoom, a smaller piece of the image strikes the image sensor. This is how the zoom increases. Some cameras have smooth zoom, which allows you to zoom partly or stop at any point of the focal length. Others have distinctive zoom, that makes 4-7 stops along the zoom length.

Most photographers don’t use the digital zoom, because it simply crops the part of the image that you want to zoom in and enlarges it. The result is a bad quality and an artificial close-up photo. You can perform the same actions of the digital zoom on your computer by cropping the desired part of the image and changing its resolution.

In most cases you’ll see the sum of the optical and digital zooms on the boxes. Remember to always check the capacity of the optical zoom, as most probably this is the one you’ll need in your photographer’s career.

Photo: © Noël Zia Lee

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