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220 The “Recording” (Camera icon) Menu Settings

5.26 ZOOM

Menu Position MENU  6  Zoom

What it Does Specifies the degree of Clear Image Zoom and Digital Zoom to
employ

Recommended Setting n/a

Constraints Menu  3  Zoom Setting must be set to either
“ClearImage Zoom” or “Digital Zoom”

Once upon a time there was something called “Digital Zoom” which made
the image look more zoomed in by simply throwing away pixels a the
perimeter of the image. Have a look at the images in Figure 5-64 to see a
graphic example. Purists hated that, so now Sony has made the technique
more interesting by introducing two functions that upsize the image back to
a full 24 MP after cropping.

Setting aside for a moment the question of “Do you really want your
camera to do that?”, I have dutifully performed tests on this feature and
compared it to doing the same thing in Photoshop, and the results are so
close that I’d call it a draw. (I’ll show you examples later on so you can
judge for yourself.)
As a photographer who prefers to do his cropping on his computer (which
can be “undone” if I don’t like it), this feature is not at all appealing. And
as someone who never upsizes his pictures unless it’s absolutely warranted
(and that rarely happens), this camera has so many megapixels to start with
that if you left the feature OFF and cropped the image without resizing
when you got home, you’ll still end up with enough megapixels left over to
make a decent sized print.

On the plus side, these features DO give you a handy zoom when shooting
movies, where there is no image deterioration (you have to throw away
pixels when shooting video anyway since HD video is so much lower
resolution than even the Image Quality = Small setting. The only
difference is with the digital zoom you’re throwing away pixels from the

Contents of this book Copyright © 2014 Gary L. Friedman. All rights reserved.