The sales pitch of 40x magnification for the camera you are about to buy sounds intriguing.

Wow! 40x!! That is way better than what the guys with the big guns are schlepping around.
And they pay out of their nose for it!

Sounds familiar? While it’s fortunately not an issue for DSLR cameras – in the Point and Shoot
Market it’s one of those things that might make you buy that camera over another.

But if we could write with animation – this would be the time, where the flow of words would come
to a screeching hold.
Optical? Digital? Who cares? Well – you should actually. Especially if you are led to believe, that
the camera with 5xoptical and 40xdigital magnification is better than the one with 10xoptical
and 20xdigital magnification. Huh?

Let’s take a look at both.
A relict from 35mm film camera times – magnification describes in this case how much closer you
can see an object, based on the view through the standard 50mm lens of olden days.

That it became the standard lens for cameras did not happen by accident. 50mm at full frame
(or the 35mm film cameras) resembles our human field of view the closest – hence it became
a viable standard that has it’s merits today as it had then.
Now – 100mm (Full Frame)  would translate to 2x magnification, and so on. So our 40x lens would
be the equivalent to a whooping 2,000mm lens. WOW!  How cool is that?

Not too cool – once you look at what is behind the digital magnification feature.
It is nothing more than what you can do at home in your editing program. Just take
your 640×480 px images and magnify it to 1280×960 pixel – there you are.

2x bigger. Do it again. A couple of times. Notice something? The image quality degrades
the more you digitally “embig” your image. You can counter it a little bit with some tools
(which is exactly what is happening in your camera, when using digital magnification)
but regardless what you do – the original image will always be looking better by leaps and
bounds.

In short – digital magnification in still photography is nothing more than a ruse. It helps
your pictures getting worse, when you use it. Not better.

Optical magnification however retains the image quality when magnifying, because the
enlarged image is captured by the sensor. The downside however is – that you do
pay a price for it. Better optics cost a lot of money. But on the bright side – they are ALWAYS
better than anything digital magnification can offer. The image below shows you, how
big of a difference it is (click image to enlarge):

The difference is drastic – and we’re talking only of a digital 10x magnification. It won’t get
better at 40x . We promise.

And while we’re at it – this also showcases the difference between APS sensor and Full Frame.
The Full Frame Sensor is based in it’s size on the 35mm film frame. The APS sensor is smaller
and introduces the so called “Crop factor” – a term that you frequently hear.

What does it mean? Cropping means to take a part out of a bigger one. With full frame being
the size standard, the size of the APS Sensor determines the equivalent of the crop factor.
The Full Frame sensor is about 1.6 times larger than Canon’s APS Sensors, 1.5 times than
Sony and Nikons and 1.4 times larger then the sensors of Olympus and Pentax.
And there you have it. And you can see this effect quite nicely in the image above.
While the Full Frame shows a wider field of view – the APS Sensor get’s the object a little
closer.

We hope you like our start into Tips, Tricks and Information.