Zoom lenses

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I now have a camcorder that takes digital stills. I would like to buy a digital camera ,yet I would miss the advantage I have with the zoom on my video camera. What kind of zoom lenses are available and in what powers for digital cameras?

-- Ed Roberson (eroberso@northland.lib.mi.us), June 30, 1999

Answers

I haven't seen any digital camera that can compete with the Sony Mavica FD-91 for Optical Zoom length. It's 14 to 1 - which is about the same as most video cameras. There are many cameras that have better resolution than the FD-91, but none with it's feature set. It even incorporates steady shot which does make a difference when using it at long settings. As a trade-off the long optical zoom and the average resolution will net you better detail then a camera with "digital" zoom when you are shooting a subject at a long telephoto setting. The Sony is also nice because it uses a floppy - they're cheap and plentiful. It's lame that Sony doesn't incorporate one of the many new high capacity floppy devices - but - C'est la vie...
They probably want to protect their memory stick market and have seemed to move away from the floppy idea - too bad. With the proliferation of 3rd party memory card offerings, and the associated price competition it would seem prudent for some company to offer high capacity floppy (zip, superdisk, click-drive) on a digital camera.
des

-- Dan Desjardins (dan.desjardins@avstarnews.com), July 01, 1999.

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