The Digital Camcorder by Numbers – Pixels, Megapixels and Zoom

The dizzying world of the digital camcorder is a confusing and difficult place to navigate for an inexperienced novice. Marketers love to baffle and entice buyers with impressive sounding numbers which encourage a purchase. Getting past the advertising bumph and cutting to the core of what you really need from a digital camcorder is the key to getting a good deal. Being able to tell the difference in pixels and zoom will set you apart from the crowd.

Put very simply, a digital picture is made up of millions of tiny dots called pixels. Pixels are marketed in different ways, which can be confusing, but basically the higher the number, the better the image quality. A digital camera these days is marketed in terms of 'megapixels'. Megapixels sound impressive because of the stupendous numbers involved which is an excellent marketing tool. In reality, megapixels are calculated by multiplying the length by the width of a given pixel resolution, so an image which is 1600 x 1200 pixels - for example - is 1,920,000 pixels or 1.9 megapixels.

This is not to be confused with a digital camcorder, which also uses pixels but is marketed by the number of horizontal lines of pixels, not the number of pixels themselves. Digital camcorders, like televisions, might have 720 horizontal lines for a high definition (HD) camera or 1,080 horizontal lines for a full HD camera. In this case the more lines, the sharper the image.

Marketers are also quick to confound the unwary with impressive sounding numbers when it comes to zooming. There are two types of zoom which govern how close you get to an object when filming or taking a picture. Optical zoom moves the lens physically closer or further away from the object, which will zoom in on a particular area. Digital zoom on the other hand takes the pixels of an image and blows them up; magnifying them in order to make you appear closer.

The short and fast rule is that optical zoom is good, digital zoom is bad. It's not really as simple as that - digital zoom can be useful, but digital zoom is much better manipulated later in an editing suite on your computer than on your digital camcorder. The problem with digital zoom is that by enlarging the pixels, the quality of the image is lost and the picture will blur or look fuzzy. Even on HD camcorders, digital zoom can look blurred and blocky.

Don't be fooled with huge numbers on the side of a box for a digital camcorder. Much like megapixels, the marketing teams will often multiply the optical zoom by the digital zoom in order to create an impressive zoom number. When buying a digital camcorder , look for the highest optical zoom you can and ignore digital zoom. Anything over 12x optical zoom is reasonable, but 30x optical zoom is exceptional and will give crystal-clear images when closing in on your subject matter.