Is digital zoom really useful?

Question

I've always wondered what is the use of digital zoom, apart from viewing the subject clearly on the LCD display.

We can take a photo with the optical zoom and crop the photo to the desired region of interest.

How does a photo taken with digital zoom compare with the cropped one? What are the advantages of having a high digital zoom?

Answer

No, it does not have much use.

Digital zoom is a restricted form of cropping:

• It is always done around the center.
• It is constrained to certain fixed increments.
• It is limited in quality by the firmware of the camera.

On the other hand, cropping can:

• Be of arbitrary size.
• Be taken from any part of the image.
• Be processed using a variety of state-of-the-art algorithms designed to produce higher-quality results than your camera can.
• Is reversible if you use a non-destructive editing software such as Lightroom or Bibble.

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