Using the Digital Zoom on your Camcorder

"Hello! I’m Ross on behalf of expertvillage.com. Let’s talk about consumer camcorders. Digital zoom allows you to get in very close. There are a couple of things you want to note about it. It’s not as clean as the optical zoom, it is built into the camera. For instance this camera has a 20 x optical zoom but 700 x digital zoom. One thing to realize, the more that you zoom in on something the more stable the camera needs to be. If you have a little bit of movement here that is exaggerated and it’s exaggerated more, the further that you are zoomed in. I actually turned off my digital zoom. The viewfinder it shows you when it goes into digital and here is the zoom switch right here, zoom in and out, go wide or tell it photo. I turn it off because you get artifacts and some other effects that I don’t like. So I stick with just straight optical zoom. I need to get closer I move closer to the subject. That’s up to you and again I you’re trying to get a shot you need to get in quick, that’s a great way because sometimes all you care about is just seen what it was, I mean if sasquatch was walking by I wouldn’t care if it was digital or optical. Actually I might want digital stay for the back."