Glossary · Camera
Optical and digital zoom
With optical zoom, the lens magnifies the subject and the quality is fully preserved. With digital zoom, only a crop of the image is enlarged, and details are lost.
What does Optical and digital zoom mean?
A smartphone has fixed lenses. “Optical zoom” there means the levels for which there is a dedicated camera, such as 3× or 5×. Everything in between and beyond is calculated.
Modern devices partly make up for this: they crop an area out of a sensor with a very high number of megapixels that still contains enough detail, and improve the result with software. In good light, this is hard to tell apart from true optical zoom, in low light more so.
A general explanation of the term, not from a video. How it plays out on a specific device in everyday use is covered in the reviews below.
