The digital camera is but a technological advancement of the conventional analogue camera. Every analogue camera component must have been improved or altered to make improvements. This discussion is an effort to unravel alteration and make one comparison between what was and what is! This debate focuses on a camera’s (analogue and digital) 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.
Both optical zoom and digital zoom magnify an image, but they act differently and produce distinct effects. In general, optical zooms always produce a far finer and advanced image than digital zoom.
Digital cameras with optical zooms work similarly to analogue zoom lenses. A typical lens accumulates light rays thrown on a film, or digital camera optical sensor. The lens’ focal length is the distance from the point where all light rays converge. Digital zoom ranges image pixels after capture, unlike optical zoom. Magnified photos have the same number of pixels. Only the light rays projected over optical sensors to determine pixels change.
It is a common intuition that optical lenses are far better than the digital zooms. Digital camera zooms rely more on computers than human interaction and knowledge. Beginner photographers find a digital zoom’s computer-friendliness handy. The computer finds an estimate of the colors each pixel captured in an image or photo. In this field, numerous approaches exist, but one of the most popular involves averaging pixels. The procedure is too hard, but digital zoom users care about the end product.
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!