Ok, this is a serious question I have here. I use a dig cam, kodak dx 6440 Supposed to be having A 4.0 megapixels 4X optical zoom 3.8X digital zoom It is also supposed to have this B SCHNEIDER-KREUZNACH VARIOGON 4X Optical Zoom Lens and C Powerful 4X optical zoom (33-132 mm equivalent) from the leader in lens optics technology and D 3.8X Advanced Digital Zoom. Now, the question. Can someone explain to me the ABCD as i put above?? 2. What is the diffrence between optical zoom and digital zoom? The cam is supposed to be going 15x zoom with both features available and it does too but my experience with zooming has been bitter. The pictures are not sharp and there is heavy pixalation. 3. Is it because I did not use a stand that I get pix and blurr or s it that it is inherent in zoom to get the blurr or am I being fooled with the promises. I shall upload a zoomed pic for your reference as to what I am complaining about.

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.

Raven is very correct..... digital zoom is useless, and I don't know why camera companies try to make it sound like a great thing, because it isn't. The only thing you should concern yourself with is the optical zoom, which is the actual focal length of the zoom lens, and forget that digital zoom even exists.

...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.

1)Use a Tripod! 2)Never use all of your zoom That abuot covers what I can tell you:)

I think I almost get the picture. I will limit myself to the optical zoom and show the result and ty all, you are wonderful. :O)) SNAKEY

Okay, Optical Vs. Digital Zoom Optical is with the lens like a telephoto--clean sharp image. Digital is like cropping the picture and blowing it up--almost like your standing face to face with a TV screen and it looks like a bunch of blocks. I hope I helped. Jinx