By Jakob Jelling http://www.snapjunky.comThe digital camera is but a technological advancement of conventional analog camera. And thus every component of analog camera must have been upgraded or changed to bring in some improvisations. This discussion is an effort to unravel alteration and make one comparison between what was and what is! This discussion is thereby focused upon a very critical component of a camera (analog as well as digital), zoom!
Before making a comparison it is important to discuss significance of subject matter, in this case zoom. Well a zoom lens has more than a few portable glass components inside it. By adjusting these components, focal length of lens can be altered. Modifying focal length alters view distance as well as reduces field of view, thereby making projected image to appear larger.
It must me noted that both optical zoom and digital zoom are components that are used to magnify an image, but they work in fundamentally different principles and acquiesces drastically different results. In general, optical zooms always produce a far finer and advanced image than digital zoom.
Looking at functions of these zooms, in digital cameras that offer optical zooms function same way similar to a zoom lens of a conventional analog camera. A conventional lens works by accumulating light rays that are projected over a portion of a film, and in this case of a digital camera optical sensor. The distance of lens from focus point where all of light rays converge is known as focal length of lens. Unlike optical zoom, digital zoom works by ranging pixels in ultimate image after image has been captured. The fact remains that same number of pixels are collected when photograph is magnified. The only thing that alters is light rays that are projected over optical sensors to figure out those pixels.