The new Samsung galaxy phone has a 200MP wide angle camera and a 10MP 10x optical zoom camera. Is it not better to take a picture with the 200MP camera then zoom in on it 10x then get a 20MP picture, than use the 10MP camera? I’m trying to wrap my head around this.
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There’s already some good answers here that don’t quite get to the point.
So, digital zoom isn’t real. Any digital camera that doesn’t have a telephoto lens (or similar) can’t actually zoom. What it can do is enlarge and crop.
So say (for the argument) you have a camera with a 200MP sensor and no telephoto lens. You want to take a zoomed photo at 90% zoom, a real closeup. So you zoom in on your camera app. Your phone can’t actually zoom, because it doesn’t have a lens to zoom with, so it instead crops the view to the part you zoomed in on, fills the screen with it, and does some AI upsampling to try and make the view look better. You end up with a 20MP image that’s had some AI sampling done to try and make it look more detailed than it actually is.
Say you had a 50MP camera with a telephoto lens. You zoom the same picture to 90%. Because this is real zoom with a telephoto lens, no cropping needs to happen. You get a full 50MP image.
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