I'll try to explain: take a picture with .. let's say 100100 Pixel into Potatoshop. Than resize it to 380380. You'll get heavy pixelation for PS tries to calculate information that's not really there. There are two black pixels next to each other? Ok ... PS will guess, that in the middle, there are more black pixels .. you got it, right? :-) The digital zoom in digicams does right that. Blowing up pictures without any real image-information. Some do a good job, some are .. less than perfect but in any case, digital zoom can't make a pic better. Try to disable that feature in your cam and just use the optical zoom. Within that the light itself is spread (sorry, can't explain that any better in english) - think of a magnifying-glass - so you get zooming almost without any loss. You'll only loose some light-strenght so that the F-values will rise a little (not on all zoom lenses, but usually that's the case). If you really need to make it bigger, try your luck in PS yourself, you may get better results as the cam does, but i'd suggest not to use digital zoom at all, if you're trying to get high-quality-pics.