Camera ZOOM Explained In Detail Optical & Digital

In this video we take a look at digital camera zoom. Zoom can be a little hard to compare between cameras, and effectively means that at X power zoom, the camera appears X times closer to the object. Digital zoom can be done a few ways. For some cameras that also take video, the camera can crop the image sensor down, giving good video quality even with moderate "digital" zoom, since its recording real pixels. Other cameras simply stretch the size of the pixels to the size of the video, reducing quality. Anything above 4x digital zoom is typically worthless, because it degrades the image quality too much. Digital zoom does reduce the quality, but in some cases like lower resolution videos recorded for youtube, the quality will hold up quite well, because you're basically shrinking the stretched pixels down to a smaller size.