...well... most can truly forget it exists. But there are some folks out there who do not regularly use computers, or image retouching tools. Maybe then the digital zoom is helpful. 'course, if you have 6M pixels to start with, a 1.5M crop is not going to look too shabby... [There also may be some advantage in applying the in-camera compression after the resizing?] But, as was said, it's mostly a Marketing trick, and here the Marketers seem to repeat themselves through the alphabet. For the best results, only use optical.