Type of "zoom" found on many digital cameras and camcorders that is completely pointless. All it does is crop your image, resulting in degradation of quality, and can easily be done with any image editing software. Optical zoom is the only zoom that matters since it does not degrade image quality. Camera manufacturers love to advertise their cameras' digital zoom capabilities in really big font, while the optical zoom capabilities are printed really small or not at all. Uneducated consumers will only look at the digital zoom and probably buy the camera based on that.
by The Huagmire July 29, 2005