I re-shot the Church Tower zoom test this morning when the air was a bit cooler and had less distortion, adding a third example to the test.

One picture was shot at maximum wide angle -- 1x zoom, you could call it.
One picture was shot at maximum zoom, including optical and digital: 96x.
One picture was shot at maximum optical zoom of 24x, then cropped in the computer to match the 96x zoom shot.

The reason for this was because I was curious about how well the camera's digital zoom would do compared to staying with just the optical zoom and cropping it in the computer. I mean, everybody knows that digital zoom is worthless, just a marketing trick to sell more cameras.

The camera did well, I think. Perhaps you can pick out which picture was pure optical with computer cropping, and which picture was full-out digital zoom on top of the optical zoom.

In the following post I am attaching a true long-range shot of San Luis Soyatlán. (File size is too large to attach to this post.)

tanstaafl.