Cormorant

Well done Woo,I have never before seen a Cormorant catch a fish when I am taking a photo of it.They are normally too far away.I hope it went down ok

 

Hi Woo, main reason for the loss of quality when using "digital zoom" is that digi zoom just takes a bit from the centre of the picture and expands it to fill the frame.
Simplified explanation >>
Imagine you had a picture made from say 1000 dots, then took 500 dots from the centre of it and magnified them to fill the same space as the original 1000; you start to see the gaps or lines start to look jagged or blurred.
Your camera sensor has a lot more than 1000 pixels (dots) but even so taking some out of the middle and expanding them tends to have a similar effect.

 

Have you and the pussy cat still got that pea green boat?

:rolleyes:

Joking apart, there is not a lot really, you could try taking the pic at the maximum optical zoom and max resolution your camera can do and then see if you can manage to crop the pic on the PC, not much different to allowing the camera to do it with Digi zoom but at least you will have a little more control and be able to see the results "full screen" where it is easier to judge. You can get supplementary lenses that screw onto the front of some digi cams, they will give some magnification but do so at the expense of picture quality, but probably not as much as digi zooming does.
PM me with camera details (make and model) and I will have a hunt online and see what might suit.

Of course you could take out a second mortgage and get a Digital SLR and massive telephoto lens, then you could expect

pics like these

(a lot there by far better photographers than me)

 

I've gone back to using the 12x zoom as the digital takes it down to 3mp. I have had the same problem although I have still not tried half of the modes available. I am still very pleased with the camera.

 

Nice to see one again ... we had them on the IoW, beautiful birds.