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         Digital Zoom  VS  Optical Zoom

Many Cameras can "zoom" to enlarge the image 2x, 3x, or more.  A zoom lens can really improve your photos, fill the frame with your subject while maintaining a comfortable distance from your subject.

You'll hear about both "Optical" and "Digital" zoom.  Don't be confused, optical is the kind you want.
An optical zoom lens magnifies the image the camera sees, without losing sharpness. 

So -Called "Digital Zoom" is confusing, because even though it is referred to as a "Zoom", it works very differently than a true zoom lens. 

Digital zoom just "stretches" what the camera has already captured, thus reducing the overall detail of the photograph. 

Optical Zoom Lenses add $50-$100 to the price of a camera, but are well worth it if you can afford one.

                                                  

What digital zoom does is enlarge a portion of the image, thus 'simulating' optical zoom. In other words, the camera crops a portion of the image and then enlarges it back to size. In so doing, you lose image quality.
If you've been regularly using digital zoom and wondered why your pictures did not look that great, now you know.

Is digital zoom therefore all bad? No, not at all. It's a feature that you might want in your digital camera (in fact, all digital cameras include some digital zoom, so you can't really avoid it), especially if you don't care about using (or don't know how to use) an image editing software. So, as far as digital zoom is concerned, you can do it in camera or you can do it afterwards in an image editing software. Any cropping and enlarging can be done in an image editing software, such as Photoshop.

So, when a digital camera is advertised with 3x digital zoom, no big deal. You can achieve the same 3x (and in fact as much as you want) digital zoom effect in an image editing software. The advantage of doing it later is that you can then decide exactly which portion to crop and how much to enlarge (3x, 4x, ...). If you do it in camera, image quality is irreversibly lost.