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Digital zoom versus optical zoom
By Jakob Jelling
Snapjunky.com
The digital camera is but a technological advancement of the
conventional analog camera. And thus every component of the
analog camera must have been upgraded or changed to bring in
some improvisations. This discussion is an effort to unravel
alteration and make one comparison between what was and what is!
This discussion is thereby focused upon a very critical
component of a camera (analog as well as digital), the zoom!
Before making a comparison it is important to discuss the
significance of the subject matter, in this case the zoom. Well
a zoom lens has more than a few portable glass components inside
it. By adjusting these components, the focal length of the lens
can be altered. Modifying the focal length alters the view
distance as well as reduces the field of view, thereby making
the projected image to appear larger.
It must me noted that both the optical zoom and the digital
zoom are components that are used to magnify an image, but they
work in fundamentally different principles and acquiesces
drastically different results. In general, optical zooms always
produce a far finer and advanced image than digital zoom.
Looking at the functions of these zooms, in digital cameras
that offer optical zooms function the same way similar to a zoom
lens of a conventional analog camera. A conventional lens works
by accumulating light rays that are projected over a portion of
a film, and in this case of a digital camera optical sensor. The
distance of the lens from the focus point where all of the light
rays converge is known as the focal length of the lens. Unlike
the optical zoom, the digital zoom works by ranging the pixels
in the ultimate image after the image has been captured. The
fact remains that the same number of pixels are collected when
the photograph is magnified. The only thing that alters is the
light rays that are projected over the optical sensors to figure
out those pixels.
It is a common intuition that optical lenses are far better
than the digital zooms. The reason is that the digital camera
zooms are more prone towards computer applications in them
rather than mostly human interactions and expertise. Yet, it
also remains a fact that beginner photographers find it more
useful to handle a digital zoom and also its computer friendly
nature. There the computer does the intricate tasks of finding
some levelheaded approximation of colors that pixel might take
up as it had captured the images or photographs. Many algorithms
are existent in this area, but perhaps the most abundantly used
algorithm involves looking at the pixels that are quite nearly
like neighbors and come up with a kind of an average. Anyways
the process remains too complicated and its end result is what
the digital zoom users are interested in.
Thus the ultimate truth remains that it is useless to compare
digital zooms with optical zooms. Perhaps it is more logical to
compare optical zoom with optical zoom and digital zoom with
digital zoom. Both these two types of zooms, the optical as well
as the digital, have some good and bad qualities. Both of them
have some extra features and preferences over the other. And
thus it is not wise to compare them, even though a comparison
may exist. The efforts would then perhaps look like comparing
oranges with apples!
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