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At a recent Green Day concert, my daughter and her friend both took pictures of the band with their smart phones. We were sitting pretty far from the stage, so they had to zoom in to compose and capture their photos. Since they were shooting with smart phones, they had to use digital zoom—which will almost always result in photos or video with degraded image quality.
Consider two photos I shot of my son (above): Both were taken with a Motorola Droid RAZR smart phone. For the image on the right, I digitally zoomed in 800 percent. For the left image, I simply walked closer to my son and shot the image.
In the photo on the right, you can see how using digital zoom makes sharp lines fuzzier and less distinct. It also drastically reduces the detail in an image. For instance, in the left image (no zoom), you can clearly make out individual strands of hair on my son's head. You can't do that in the digital-zoom photo.
Digital zoom often introduces image noise and visual artifacts into the photo. In the digitally zoomed photo is a conspicuous pattern of purple and green dots in the background. Digital zoom gives shadows a purple hue. And perversely, digital zooming actually results in a larger file size.
Just about every time, the best advice is to not use digital zoom when you shoot with a smart phone, camera, tablet, or camcorder. Instead, try cropping the photos either on your device, if it has that feature, when you import them into an image-editing program on your computer.
Just for the record: I didn't lecture my daughter or her friend on the perils of using digital zoom at the concert. I just let them have fun!
—Terry Sullivan
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