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#41 | |
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Join Date: Mar 2003
Posts: 438
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With optical zoom alone, then the quality of the lens takes more importance. |
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#42 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Aug 2002
Posts: 2,162
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But if you had 10X more pixels than you needed for a standard print, would you get the same or better quality without the optical zoom lens, in a lighter more compact camera?
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#43 | |||||||||||||
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Join Date: May 2003
Posts: 47
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I just want to say that I'm totally gobsmacked.
Following kcemb's suggestion, I took two photos of the same scene. One with no zoom and one at full (3x) zoom. I never thought for a minute this would happen, but the objects in the photo are approximately three times wider at 3x zoom! In other words, a 3x zoom makes objects nine times bigger. So it seems I was wrong all along and BillDrew and everyone else were right! Of course I can understand now how square roots come into it, if the zoom factor affects the width of the photo and not its area. All I can say is that I have been grossly misinformed. I have heard it said (and read) over and over than the zoom factor refers to the size of objects. If you zoom in 10x then objects appear 10x bigger. Not taller. Not wider. Bigger. I'm actually quite annoyed that there are so many people out there spreading false information about zoom factors. I've read statements such as: "a 2x zoom makes objects appear two times bigger" several times. I have always been convinced that a 2x zoom means that you can fit twice the amount of picture in, not four times the amount! I had decided this long ago because when I was a lad (about 15 years ago) I had a camcorder with 6x zoom and when I first got it I wondered if "6x zoom" meant 6x the dimensions, or 6x the area, so I experimented and found that the camera was zooming into an area one 6th of the full area. I guess the manufacturer must've been using a different terminology to the one that is most popular. Anyway. I'm absolutely delighted to find that 3x makes objects 9 times bigger. Because, using my old definition of what zoom means, I now have a 9x zoom camera! ![]() I don't use the zoom very often, otherwise I may have noticed this before. Anyway, I really should reply to people's posts: Quote:
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I never said I thought I could take 2272x1704 photos at 9.5x zoom. I said that my camera can take 2272x1704 photos at 3x zoom, but if I crop them down to 1280x960 then I can get a 9.5x zoom. I realise 1280x960 isn't as good as 4 megapixels. But 1280x960 is still not an awful resolution. It's bigger than most computer screens. Note that this was before I discovered I was wrong about zoom factors. Using my newly adjusted concept of what zoom is, cropping my photos down to 1280 would give me a zoom of 1.8x. Which, when combined with my 3x optical zoom would give me just over 5x zoom. Although I have to say I don't really care about trying to increase my zoom anymore, now I know that my 3x zoom makes objects three times their original width, and not just three times bigger. Quote:
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I will answer all the questions you asked me in your most recent post... Quote:
I also don't see the need to store a 1 megapixel image at a 4 megapixel filesize. Keeping a "scaled up" version of a photo on my hard drive seems pointless, when the original contains all the information and is much sharper. Quote:
All the photos on my hard drive are all kinds of different sizes. Some are many megapixels; some are 300x300 gifs I downloaded from the Web. But I don't tend to look at them at their original size, I tend to stretch them to fit the screen. If I looked at them at their original size, some would be unviewable and some would be off the screen. Quote:
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I mentioned scanners because I was making the pont that having more pixels doesn't make an image better quality. Scanners often provide higher resolution scans - but the scans are no better quality, they're just lower resolution scans that are scaled up to a higher resolution. I thought this was an important point to make, because I was trying to explain how a higher resolution photo could, in theory, be lower quality, if the resolution of the CCD had a limit, and the camera was just scaling images up, like scanners do. In which case, taking lower resolution photos would yeild higher quality photos, because there would be no interpolation occurring. Quote:
When 1 megapixel cameras were the highest anyone could get, then a camera that takes 1.2 megapixel photos at 9.5x zoom would seem like a good thing. Just because there are now higher resolution cameras available doesn't mean that 1 megapixel photos are useless. As I explained above, many computer screens are lower resolution than 1280x960, so these photos would at least be useful for on-screen viewing. For example, I could take 1280x960 photos of birds at 9.5x zoom, and put them on a website for people to download. Again, I should point out that I'm now aware that zoom factors don't relate to area - they relate to dimensions. |
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#44 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: Aug 2002
Posts: 1,910
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One more time, merely cropping an 8x10" photo to 4x5" doesn't make a zoomed in photo...unless you then enlarge that cropped photo back up to the original size of 8x10", in which case you are doing a "digital zoom". |
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#45 | |
Member
Join Date: May 2003
Posts: 47
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Funny, I tried to write a word that means the opposite of "blow", but it censored it. Is "s*ck" a swear word now? |
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#46 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Dec 2002
Posts: 5,803
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This forum package is a little aggressive on its censoring. I've wanted to use that work as well, but it doesn't let me... so I just write around it.
I agree on the digital zoom being rubish. Some people have made a decent argument in their favor... because some cameras without a raw format will do the digital zoom in camera before the jpg compression happens. Since all in-desktop-computer digital zoom on a jpg will happen after jpg compression, there is something to said for that argument.... but I'd still take an optical zoom any day (and I'm will to pay for it.) |
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