Digital Zoom Cameras
That marvel of technology the digital zoom camera can trace its roots back to back to 1951. This was when the worlds first VTR (Video Tape Recorder) captured its first image from a TV screen. It took nearly 44 years from that point for the digital camera revolution to take off, starting with the release of the Kodak D40 camera in 1995. Since 1995 it has been one digital advance after another, from the major improvements in CCD’s (Charge Couple device), the ever increasing size of flash memory cards and now even underwater digital zoom cameras that don’t require special cases.
So what do you look for in a digital camera?
Many digital cameras offer both digital and optical zoom. These two often confuse the average camera shopper, until you know what you’re looking at.
Optical zoom works much like the zoom lens on a 35 mm film camera. It changes the distance end to end of your camera’s lens and draws the subject nearer to you. The optical zoom keeps the superiority of the picture. Digital zoom works differently. It simply takes the photo and crops it then enlarges the part that is left. It causes the quality of the photo to be reduced, sometimes by large amounts.
What this means in terms of quality is that you may have a excellent view of a subject through the lens using digital zoom, but chances are your photograph will become imprecise when using the digital zoom function. Details may become lost or fuzzy. It is actually helpful to turn off the digital zoom element of your camera if possible. This will put a stop to your repeatedly zooming in too close to a subject, since the digital zoom is often used as an extension of the optical zoom.
There are a couple of things you can do if you want a closer view of a subject, but want the excellence of your photo to still be good. Try moving in closer when you take the image. Often only a foot or two will do the job. If this isn’t doable, you can set your camera to take an image at its highest file size. This will result in an image that can be cropped to consist of only your desired subject, yet allow for a picture that is still clear.
Digital zoom has its place. It can be used if the only fate of your photograph is the internet. Digital camera images online can be a much reduced quality in the camera and still come out very acceptable when passed through e-mail or posted on a web gallery. If your goal is printing, however, search for a camera that has a greater optical zoom and switch off the digital zoom. Your photographs will be better in the end, even if they are not as enlarged.
So just what does the future look like for digital cameras? Well no one can say for sure, but one of the areas that will be changing is the CCD as they morph into APS’s (Active Pixel Sensor). An APS will be much cheaper to manufacture, be much smaller and produce a higher quality image.
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