Camera New

I'm looking to buy a new digital camera. Is it more important to have a digital zoom, or optical?

Over Christmas, I bought an inexpensive camera, and it took terrible pictures. When I exchanged it, the salesman told me that was because it only had a certain type of zoom, and now I can't remember which one to have. I thought some of them had optical and digital, but now I'm not sure.

Public Comments

1. maybe just talk to a person in the store they are very helpful and know their stuff
2. an optical zoom is usually what you should shoot for, but a combination of optical plus digital is also very reliable. you should never rely on digital zoom alone. cameras with digital zoom only are almost always okay during the day only and they take really bad pictures at night. but a combination, or optical zoom only camera will definitely give a more superior picture ability. the one you bought at the store is most likely digital zoom, i have had same experience.
3. optical
4. Optical counts. Digital is pretty much useless. WK
5. Optical zoom is by means of the lens. This is all that counts. Digital zoom is a gimmic: the camera just uses software to blow up the central part of the picture. You can achieve the same result by cropping the picture on your PC.
6. Optical, period. Digital zooms emulate an optical zoom by enlarging part of the image electronically, and the quality gets worse the more you zoom. Optical zooms make the camera bigger, but there are some fairly small cameras out there with 12x optical zooms built in. Most small cameras have 3x optical zooms, but if you can choose a bigger camera with a larger optical zoom range, you'll be happier.
7. I recently learned the hard way that optical zoom is the way to go. My current camera has digital zoom and some of my pics turn out horrible, especially after I try to zoom-and-crop while editing pictures.