What is the difference between a camera’s optical zoom and a magnification in a binocular?
April 19, 2010 by
Filed under Zoom Binoculars
For e.g. an 8x optical zoom in a camera and an 8x magnification in a 8×40 binocular?? Is there any difference between these 2, or are they the same??
no, they are not the same. When a camera says it has 8x optical zoom, you must first known the effective highest focal length. If the widest is 35 mm 8x that is 280 mm. A camera of about 105 mm is equivalent to about 1x of a binoculars, so 8x in binoculars is about 840 mm in a camera. It is not completely so simple as that though because digital cameras today are 10 meg pix and even more. That means that you can blow up an 4×6 picture into 8×12 or even larger. You do not see such a large picture through binoculars. In fact some binoculars have a somewhat restricted field of view. What I am attempting to say is that by blowing up the photo you might possibly get as large an image as you might see through the binoculars.