Digital/dynamic zoom is a digital camera or video recorder's ability to stretch an image that is already at maximum zoom, allowing you to zoom in by stretching the pixels. It's like cropping an image on your computer, enlarging a section of it.
Dynamic, or digital, zoom is a new technique employed by manufacturers in most of their cameras and video recorders. It is a way of boosting the zoom of a camera lens, without majorly compromising the image quality.To the naked eye, it may seem that there is no difference in the quality or resolution of the image on the LCD screen, when using digital zoom as opposed to optical, but this might not be the case on high-definition, or high resolution models.
It is best to treat optical zoom as the most that a camera or video recorder has. Optical zoom is the best for still photography, whereas the best zoom for video is still undecided. If you use digital zoom on a camera, you need to use Image Stabilization, to prevent blurring of the video when the recorder is moved. With some video recorders, like the Flip camera and the Kodiak Zi8, where the lenses are fixed, the only way to zoom is through Digital zoom, however Image Stabilization cannot be used when Digital zoom is working.
CCDs in cameras allow for better light detection, which helps image stabilization by determining certain light intensity and color bodies in the image, thus smoothing the edges, and blending frame to frame a lot cleaner. CCDs work better in low-light conditions, but do not work well with SD or High-Definition quality resolutions, so the dynamic zoom may not work as well in conjunction with a CCD, due to the lowered quality of the image in low light.
Dynamic, or digital, zoom is a new technique employed by manufacturers in most of their cameras and video recorders. It is a way of boosting the zoom of a camera lens, without majorly compromising the image quality.To the naked eye, it may seem that there is no difference in the quality or resolution of the image on the LCD screen, when using digital zoom as opposed to optical, but this might not be the case on high-definition, or high resolution models.
It is best to treat optical zoom as the most that a camera or video recorder has. Optical zoom is the best for still photography, whereas the best zoom for video is still undecided. If you use digital zoom on a camera, you need to use Image Stabilization, to prevent blurring of the video when the recorder is moved. With some video recorders, like the Flip camera and the Kodiak Zi8, where the lenses are fixed, the only way to zoom is through Digital zoom, however Image Stabilization cannot be used when Digital zoom is working.
CCDs in cameras allow for better light detection, which helps image stabilization by determining certain light intensity and color bodies in the image, thus smoothing the edges, and blending frame to frame a lot cleaner. CCDs work better in low-light conditions, but do not work well with SD or High-Definition quality resolutions, so the dynamic zoom may not work as well in conjunction with a CCD, due to the lowered quality of the image in low light.
