LENS - FIXED OR ZOOM?

Perhaps of equal importance when it comes to digital cameras (or any still camera for that matter) is the lens.  In order to get good pictures, the camera should also have good quality lenses (made of glass, of course God forbid if the lens is ever made of plastic ).

Like cheap film cameras, low-priced digicams have a fixed-focus lens, meaning the lens don't move, or zoom in and out.  Simple solution, you might say... just move closer to the subject or back away when you take a picture.  You can do that, but there is a big disadvantage.  Since the lens don't move (and most fixed-focus cameras are set at wide-angle), these cameras can only take a sharp picture at a certain distance.  Anything nearer or farther than this particular distance tends to blur or distort the image, or takes it out of focus.



REFERENCE PICTURE



FORCING A CLOSE-UP ON A FIXED-FOCUS CAMERA RESULTS IN  A BLURRED AND DISTORTED PICTURE (BARREL EFFECT).



ZOOMED-IN PICTURE TAKEN AT THE SAME DISTANCE AS THE ABOVE REFERENCE PHOTO.

A zoom lens, on the other hand, eliminates the wide-angle distortion you get from a fixed-focus lens.  And, it allows you to take close-up photos of your subjects even at a distance (this is called telephoto view).  Of course, a camera with zoom lens significantly costs more, depending on the range of zoom ratios it supports.  Zoom ratios usually range from 2x to as high as 10x (or even higher).  The higher the zoom ratio, the more expensive the camera.

A word of caution: camera manufacturers often stress on "digital zoom" or "optical and digital zoom combined" when they market their products.  Pay more attention on the optical zoom rather than the digital zoom.  Optical zoom is real zoom, since it involves the lens actually moving in and out the camera's body.  Digital zoom (or should I say, fake zoom) on the other hand, merely crops out the outer areas of the image, and enlarges the middle portion, creating the illusion that the image is magnified.  Be wary of models that bear a 10x zoom rating only to find out that it has an optical zoom of 2x and a digital zoom of 5x.

Now, did you say you want to take a close-up picture of that deadly snake at the zoo?

| Previous Page | Main Page |

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1