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[James Dasher <jdasher AT ibiblio.org>]

On Tuesday, Mar 9, 2004, at 20:18 US/Eastern, Sil Greene wrote:

> Reported 04.03.09 20:04 from James Dasher:
> .:
> .:If you want more than your basic point-and-shoot with minimal zoon, 
> I'd
> .:recommend saving your pennies and buying a digital body that will 
> work
> .:with your SLR lenses - a Canon (the new Digital Rebel is now under
> .:$1000) if you use Canon/Sigma lenses, a Nikon for the Nikon/Nikkor 
> (the
> .:Nikon body is tres expensive, IIRC), etc.
>
> In this same vein, if you care about your image quality, make sure your
> camera allows you to turn any Digital Zoom feature *OFF*.  Digital 
> zoom is
> pointless; Optical Zoom, using real lenses (like the ones for your 
> SLR),
> is the only thing you want to use.

Sil's absolutely right.  On many cameras, setting the image resolution 
to the highest level eliminates the camera's ability to zoom digitally, 
but still, optical zoom doesn't distort your image so much.

> If you want proof, consider that Digital Zoom is done in software (or
> occasionally hardware -- circuitry -- which can be just as buggy as
> software, with the advantage of being harder to patch).  Ask yourself 
> how
> often your commercial software works as advertised, every time.
>
> Optical zooms don't have that problem.  :)

To go off on a related tangent: One problem optical zooms *do* have, 
though, is that camera and lens manufacturers haven't really begun to 
modify the lenses for digital photography.  As a result, whether you 
use a point-and-shoot or digital SLR, digital prints always look - 
well, *digital*.  No matter how great the image resolution,  You can 
almost always tell a digital print from a film print.

Regards -
James

PS I think I've hit my posting quota for the month - and made up for 
some of the slack over the past few, too.