Hmmmmmmm. Interesting stuff. Using digital zoom you're not getting any more information in those 3mp, though, and so it's the camera hardware/software that has to fill in the missing bits. It takes optical zoom to actually fill in the missing bits with real-world information. My contention is that PS probably does the work of filling in missing bits better than what's on board a Nikon or Olympus or Sony or Canon or (especially) a Palm or Motorola or Nokia or Apple digital camera. I could be wrong, but I don't think so, especially that latter group (with tiny, slow, cheap camera hardware and only basic software).
Cheers, Don From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Messeder Sent: Saturday, February 06, 2010 9:56 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Treo] webOS suggestions for Palm - "official" nomination thread Let's say, to make up some easy numbers, the camera shoots a 3Mp picture. Whatever it sees, it spreads across all 3 million pixels - whether that's the full cubicle or the face of the person working there. What makes the picture look closer, whether by optical or digital zoom, is that the face takes up more space in the frame. Taking more space in the frame means that the face now uses the same 3 million pixels that in a wider shot recorded the entire cubicle. That's part of why digital lenses talk about magnification rather than focal length, and why a 300mm digital zoom lens on my Nikon digital is "equivalent" to a 450mm lens on my old FM. But if I shoot wide and crop in PS, I actually remove a bunch of pixels from the pic. To get the size back, I have to add pixels, and that means PS has to interpolate colors and detail as it makes the transition to give me back a portion of the original pic in the original 3Mp size. That said, it can be done, and the result isn't really terrible, especially for newsprint and online reproduction. But it's better if the camera uses all the pixels it has in the shot, rather than doing the conversion in PS. On 2/6/2010 10:43 AM, Don Ferguson wrote: > Yep, but my point is that with digital (rather than optical) zoom, the same > thing happens whether it's on the camera or in PS. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
