What's the difference between optical zoom and digital zoom?

Sherrill Botting: It's a Canon PowerShot S5 IS

Felipa Nosis: Ignore digital zoom when evaluating cameras, all it does is make lousy pictures. Optical zoom measures how much the lens can magnify your image. To use your example, a 12x optical zoom has a 12:1 zoom ratio. That means at the telephoto end, it has 12 times the magnification it has at the wide angle end. Digital zoom simply takes the pixels in the middle of your photograph and magnifies them, effectively making your 18 Megapixel camera into a five or six Megapixel camera. Shoot with optical zoom only. If you really need to magnify the center of your image, you can do it later with any picture editing software and get a better result. As to whether $350 is a good price... probably, but you don't say what model it is. Assuming it's a name brand camera, I'd say $350 is a good price....Show more

Verena Koop: optical zoom is the movment of the lense in the camera.digital zoom is making the pixels b! igger (that option comes in after the optical zoom has reached the maximum zoom).i think its a pretty okay deal.

Lorine Helwick: Optical zoom is a zoom created by moving the lens inside the camera. A digital zoom is simply magnifying the existing image. A high digital zoom sacrifices image quality to get its effect, where an optical zoom results in a closer image with the same image quality.

Alden Sabio: Optical zoom is better and digital isn't very important. That sounds like a very good camera, but with a 8 megapixel your memory card is going to have to have a lot of memory.

Elvie Drumgoole: Optical zoom brings you closer to the object without sacrificing the quality of the image. The 10x optical zoom is a good choice. The higher the number the farther you can take away the pictures and yet you can still get the best results. Yes you can zoom an object by 10x. On the other hand, digital zoom is simply cropping the image and then enlarge to the size sh! all we say 4 times. The concept is making the image expand 4 t! imes from the original, thereby causing distortion to the image....Show more