A digital zoom is when a camera recreates the effect of zooming in with a lens by capturing the image from an increasingly smaller area of the camera’s sensor, and then blowing up that image to the regular size. It appears as if the lens is zooming in, but in fact the effect is purely software based and has nothing to do with optics at all.
Zoom is a feature common among cameras and is used to make the subject appear closer. Cameras on mobile phones often have a zoom feature as well but most often it is digital zoom.
Digital zoom is implemented in one of two ways:- Cropping - the software crops the image so that the subject would appear bigger on the screen of the phone but the resulting image is smaller than the maximum resolution of the camera. The photo of the subject does not have any more detail than a non-cropped photo would.
- Stretching - this is similar to cropping but instead it stretches the cropped photo to the selected resolution. Since the stretching is done by an algorithm that uses just the information from the cropped photo no additional detail is visible.
Digital zooms are often found on cell phones, which do not have space for any kind of optical zoom internally. They are also quite common on point and shoot cameras. Many of those cameras will have an optical zoom that turns into a digital zoom at the end of its travel. Be careful when you check the specifications before your next camera purchase! You want to base your choices on the length of the optical zoom because this is where the quality is. I would recommend only using a digital zoom in an emergency.
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