First, let me start by making a strong statement: there is no such thing as digital zoom.
Digital zoom is a simulation of zoom, done by cropping the image
Optical zoom provides vastly superior images when compared with digital zoom systems
A digital zoom, is simply some in-camera image processing. When you use a digital zoom, the camera enlarges the image area at the center of the frame and trims away the outside edges of the picture. The result is the same as when you open an image in your photo-editing program, crop away the edges of the picture, and then enlarge the remaining portion of the photo.
This type of zoom will result in a loss of quality and image resolution because the image is simply being enlarged without any extra details or
pixels being added
Enlarging the “zoomed” area also
enlarges the pixels and reduces the image resolution and the image quality.
No improvement to the sensor or lens is necessary for the addition of a digital zoom, is it made possible in the software.
As you zoom in on a scene, the camera draws a crop box around the pixels in the image sensor and discards information outside the frame. Only the pixels inside the frame are recorded. And that means that the sensor's full resolution isn't being used. The more you zoom in, the fewer pixels you'll have in your final image. That's a real waste of your camera, because you're throwing away image quality.
There is one area of using digital zoom, may, benefit you.
If you are only using the zoom as a viewfinder to get a closer look at an object, zooming in could help, but keep one thing in mind, your depth perception will be altered, as you are not seeing the whole picture, and objects up, down, left, and right, are still there, but now you can't see them, not a good thing while flying a $1400 camera a mile away, and watching on a 5 or 7 inch screen.
Also the resolution of the feed to the live view will be
reduced when zooming.
O.K. this in my last post on
this topic, my only intent was to share my view on digital zoom.
It seems some people get offended when others don't share their opinions, I am not one of them.
If the digital zoom feature works well, please post your results, so others can judge it's merits.