Cameraphones - Zoom
Skip contentMost cameraphones are provided with a zoom control, so that the picture can be magnified by around 2x, 3x or 4x to show an enlarged section of the image taken by the camera. The usual type of picture enlargement offered in cameraphones is digital zoom, which is performed electronically by the software, and this is not the same as an optical zoom that requires a complex lens system.
Digital zoom will enlarge a portion of the photograph that you wish to use, but it will do so at the expense of the resolution, and so it is not going to be of much use if you need the best quality result. Also, since scaling up the existing pixels produces the zoom effect, it is not usually an option at the maximum resolution sizes available in the camera. At the lower resolution settings digital zoom may provide a useful facility to enlarge the photo. In contrast, in an optical zoom system the lens is physical adjusted to increase or decrease the image size, and this will provides the best results; however, this is not really an option for most cameraphones, due to the limitations of space and cost.
