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What were the settings on those four frames? I'm guessing (TL) full zoom out (or some wide angle?), (TR) full optical zoom, (BL) full digital zoom, (BR) then that crazy crop thing where it does digial zoom but crops the image to 1024x768 or something.


TL: 10 MP, full zoom out, wide angle attachment (see the vignetting on the corners?)

TR: Wide angle attachment removed, 10 MP, full optical zoom.

BL: 3 MP*, full optical zoom

BR: 3 MP*, full optical zoom plus 4x digital zoom

All pictures were subsequently resized down to 640x480 to limit the file size.

*The camera offers the option of shooting at 10, 8, 5, 3, and 2 MP. The lower MP numbers mean that you are using just the center portion of the CCD, and while I don't understand the mechanics, using just the center of the CCD gives greater optical zoom. This is separate from the 2x or 4x digital zoom. Thus, the effective optical zoom ratios are:

10 MP: 12x
8 MP: 14x (?) don't remember this one exactly)
5 MP: 17.4x
3 MP 21.4x

Then you can use the digital zoom at 2x or 4x, to give a maximum possible zoom ratio of 85.6x.

In my case, since I "cheated" with the wide angle extender, I was probably well over 100x zoom from widest to most tele.

I make no claims that the most extreme zoom gave superb picture quality, but considering that the setup was the worst possible scenario, the picture was nonetheless surprisingly usable.

And yes, of course, I'd be better off to skip the digital zoom and use Photoshop or some other image processing software instead. But this was meant to be a total "in-camera" test, just to see what it could do.

tanstaafl.
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