Canon SD700 digital zoom

[Dr. Jimbo]

I've just purchased an SD700 and the digital zoom doesn't seem to work. I just returned an SD550 for the same reason. Is there something I'm doing wrong? The optical zoom works fine. I checked it against my S400 (which tells me how much magnification I'm at), and it zooms into 12X. The SD700 is only doing 4X.
Should I send it back and try another camera?
Thanks,
Jimbo

[David Metsky]

By default, most cameras have the setting for digital zoom turned off. You have to go into the menus and turn it on.

But there is rarely a reason to do so. Digital zoom is doing nothing that you cant do to the image on the computer, and it's usually doing it in a worse fashion. Why do you want digital zoom?

-dave-

[Dr. Jimbo]

I like to have the digital zoom when I am so far away that I want to zoom in and get that on film that you can hardly see on the LCD. I don't use it often but like the time in Jamaica that I saw a small tornado, digi zoom was the only way I could capture it and show others.
Thanks for your info, I'll check to see if it is off.

[David Metsky]

If you take the picture without using digital zoom, you can zoom in review mode. That way you can have the better quality picture and still show off the shots.

-dave-

[Paul79UF]

I would just leave digital zoom off. It does nothing for you that you can't do in photoshop or other photo editing programs.

Like a previous poster said, it's better to get a full quality high resolution picture than to use the digital zoom and degrade the image.

[BowerR64]

The only thing that digital zoom does really is save memory.

Say you take a shot at the max resolution its about 3 megs (just a figure) then you zoom in and crop it down to the little part you want save it to about 1 meg. Digital zoom is doing all the cropping before you save it on the memory.

If this isnt right some one correct me. I believe this is what its doing.

The camera is already displaying the image at the resolution you have it set to (max or what ever you set yours to) then kinda zooms in on that section and then captures it at that spacific point.

[Dr. Jimbo]

Thanks Dave, that did it.
I haven't had a chance to dink around with this camera to see what it can do. My cameras before the SD700 and SD550 were the S400 and the S500. I had those pretty much down (until the dreaded E18 error code on the S500-let's just say, that camera is no longer with us. BTW, brute force and digital cameras doesn't work).
I understand the quality of the image suffers with the digi zoom and photoshop can help me. I really only print and mess with pix I really want. All the other ones I usually share with others on my PC or Mac. (When I come back from vacation, I don't print all 1000+ images) My wife gets trigger happy so I'm so glad we aren't using 35 mm film anymore. Those trips to the photo lab were killing me!