Digital zoom

Glossary Terms

Digital zoom is a form of false zoom employed in digital cameras as a marketing gimmick. A cropped portion of the image is upsized to the usual image size, and this was presented as a form of "zoom". The digital zoom was included with the optical zoom to exaggerate the zoom capabilities of a camera. This practice died out after the early days of digital photography.

One notable exception is with more recent Fujifilm SuperCCD based cameras where digital zoom is made mildly advantageous over cropping because of complex technical reasons.