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Originally posted by Greenroom
Just a question for the camera heads out there... is 3x optical zoom good?
Talking "still" cameras here, no good for taking shots from the beach, you need about 10X for that.
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what is optical zoom and digital zoom?
optical is as it implies produced by the lense system, you still get the full pixel resolution possible.
Digital is produced by the camera firmware, and is mainly achieved by "croping" the outside pixels. This means loss of resolution, a camera with more mega pixels can aford to throw more pixels away, but optical zoom is still prefrable.
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what is the most common zoom on digital cameras?
most have both digital and optical but the amount varies all over the place, higher numbers of optical are becoming more common, guess the average is around 3 or 4 and the highest I've seen is 12.
Note sure about taking from the water, never done it, But I think it'd be hard using a lot of telephoto in the water, gets hard to hold camera steady enough. Think that's why you see the guys in the water getting so close to the action.
My feeling is 3X or 4X is about all you could use anyway,
For 10X a tripod is really necessary, although I hear modern cameras have "image stabilisers" that reduce this need.
