What is better Optical zoom or Digital zoom?

Answer 1

In the shortest answer...An optical lens shows you the ACTUAL image using glass and mirrors...NO electronics necessary. A digital lens uses glass to project the image onto an "image sensor computer chip" and the computer chip displays it's "interpretation" of the image onto the LCD screen. That's as basic as I think I can make it. Hope it helps!

Answer 2

Optical zoom is the change created by focusing lenses to see further away or closer. Digital zoom is a change in the size of the digital optical reader surface used to read (see) the image. The optical reader (not the technical term) does not change size; the device (camera) just discards information that is not in our focus. In theory, this would mean a loss of resolution. Since you often do not use the resolution that the optical reader is capable of (because of limited data storage and display capabilities) this loss often does not happen, or matter to you.

Answer 3

It's very rare to find lenses that aren't optical, so I think you've probably talking about optical vs digital zoom, which is common. With optical zoom you move the lenses WRT each other to make the object appear closer or farther away. With digital zoom OTOH you play around with the pixels, the actual picture elements instead to make the image bigger or smaller. Digital zoom is more rugged and cheaper to build, but will eventually result in a loss of resolution.

Answer 4

Optical zoom is the ability of the camera lens to zoom in before capturing the picture

Digital zoom is the ability of the camera to zoom in after capturing the actual picture.

See the related link below for more information.

Answer 5

Optical zoom is where your camera's lens is actually moving to zoom in, digital zoom is where the digital part of the camera tries to get closer to zoom, digital zoom is basically pointless because when you use it you image quality is severely damaged.

Answer 6

Optical Zoom is the true zoom, Digital is basically the zoom in of what the highest optical zoom is. Therefore Optical Zoom is the better zoom, and gives a much clearer picture.