In Reply to: Optical is your normal zoom posted by carbali on Wednesday, 24. May 2006 at 09:56 Bali Time:
optical zoom is the amount which your camera will zoom in on the subject of the picture, thereby making the object appear closer with very little loss of definition.
Digital zoom is where the optically zoomed object is digitally enhanced to appear closer, but in reality it wont appear as sharp as it is effectively just increasing the size of the pixels. Digital zoom kicks in after you have reached full optical zoom and will show differently on your lcd display (one of my cameras says 5.4 mag or something similar)
When you are buying a camera, digital zoom will be a larger number than optical zoom but I have never found it to be very useful.
Hope this helps you a little and perhaps others can correct or improve on my interpretation?
Regards
Alanna