What is the best ISO to use when taking a digitally zoomed shot?
Personally, I never use digital zoom. There is no extra detail gained at all so I really don't see the point. You can always crop if you need to get closer. that's essentally what digital zooming is. As for the best ISO to use...I honestly have no clue. I'm assuming the lowest ISO your camera will alow.
This of course is just one way of thinking.
IMO: Digital Zoom is not evil. It does have it's place and use. I think it's a mistake to illuminate it completely.
:)
i dont know about iso settings but i think the digital zoom on my camera works great. i also put on the noise reduction feature when i use it. check out this page on my website and click on the hockey pictures, they were taken with the digital zoom. and keep in mind that i was sitting in the very very top row in the very back corner of the arena. i think they came out pretty good.
When a digital camera is advertised with 3X digital zoom, you can achieve the same 3X digital zoom effect in any image editing software after you've downloaded your pics. The advantage of doing it later is that you can then decide exactly which portion of the image to crop and how much to enlarge (2X, 3X,etc). If you do it in camera, image quality is irreversibly lost.
And chances are, the "upscaling" that you can do on your computer is much more advanced than the tiny computer in a camera can do. For example, take a look at this picture which demonstrates various "upsizing" algorithms. The top-left image is the equivalent of what having true 4X optical zoom would get you. The top-right image is like the equivalent crop from a camera that doesn't have any optical zoom. The pictures below show various algorithms that achieve the same 4X zoom-factor through image interpolation.
The one labelled "Pixel Resize" is what a lot of digital cameras do when they are "digitally zoomed". Look how bad that looks! Some cameras may achieve slightly better results than that, but most don't even come close to Photoshop Bicubic interpolation. Considering what you can do afterwards with some of the algorithms demonstrated on that page, I'd never let the camera "throw information away" just for the sake of making it look "closer" on the LCD display on the back of the camera (which is a very low-res device).
The only thing I generally use digital zoom for is if something is just on the edge of being recognizable while I'm taking the shot. Sometimes if I zoom in with digital zoom, the interpolation is just decent enough to see enough detail to either figure out what I'm looking at, or decide if it's worth having a real picture of.
For example, a couple of weeks ago I was on a pier and saw something bobbing in the water. I couldn't decide if it was something interesting or not - looked like it might be a seal or diver popping their head up. A quick shot with the digital zoom showed it was just a stupid can, so I didn't give it another thought. :)
As far as ISO, always shoot on the lowest setting you can given available light.
I agree with Eddy. Digital zoom is absolutely useless and should never, ever be used if you are ever going to look at your photo on a computer screen. Digital zoom was designed and invented for people who take pictures, then take their compact flash card out of their camera and stick it directly in the machine at WalMart to get prints, never having looked at the shot on a computer at all, much less in an image-editing program. Scott found perhaps the only useful aspect of a digital zoom - to see what something is on your LCD. Had it been a seal that Scott was looking for, I'm confident he would have turned off the digital zoom, then taken his picture.
The only time I've found digital zoom useful was when framing subjects at range that I actually cared about timing when I took the shot.
Certainly for static subjects, digital zoom is less than useless. You will always be able to as well as, if not better later with a crop and/or resize in software.
However, for moving subjects, digital zoom can mean the difference between a useable and a useless shot. I've used it for example to shoot a moose at a fairly extreme range, where I could identify using the digizoom when the head was in a position that I wanted.
I've also used it for field sports, where I wanted to try to capture certain action that was hard to see without using zoom.
Both these cases are at the extreme end of what the particular camera could do, if I shot them later and cropped, I'd still have a pretty small final file, but with digital zoom I at least had more confidence in what I had actually captured.
Mind you, I also use my on camera flash a lot too, so what do I know ?
Wow...after reading all your comments on digital zoom, I think I may never use it again.
Thanks for all the advice and examples.
This forum is truely helpful.
Thanks everyone
I occassionally use digital zoom for the reasons Gordon gave. I would prefer a feature that digitally zoomed the image only for viewing and then took a regular non digitally zoomed image. Reviewing the shot later to see if you got it the way you wanted does no good if you missed the shot and the subject has run off into the woods.
I occassionally use digital zoom for the reasons Gordon gave. I would prefer a feature that digitally zoomed the image only for viewing and then took a regular non digitally zoomed image. Reviewing the shot later to see if you got it the way you wanted does no good if you missed the shot and the subject has run off into the woods.
T
I think we'll probably see features like this more and more as EVFs become more common.
There is one semi-useful case I have found for using digital zoom. I have used it as an in-camera crop to save space on the memory card. There have been time where I wanted to take a picture of somthing that took up a small portion of the image, so I set the image size to 1/2 the normal size and used a 2x digital zoom. This gives almost the same quality as taking the picture full size without the digital zoom and then cropping out all but the center.
