Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK
Would rather, but often can't.
An 8 MB pic is too big to send to many phones as a pic message, so you're likely shooting at a lower resolution and not interpolating much, and if you are uploading directly to a blog or photo sharing site, or what have you, as is more and more the case, it's ugly to send a huge picture with a dot in the middle and tell your visitors to zoom in on their own. Much better to have the big, but lower quality, primary subject filling more of the frame.
This is, as I say, thinking of the device as a phone that has a camera, and not as a camera. If you are treating as a camera (and shame on you for not having a purpose built camera with a good zoom lens) then I agree, don't use the digital zoom. Just capture the scene in native full res, and then even using the device's on-board photo editing app to crop would be better.
But that's not as handy, when your main goal is to quickly capture what you see and send it to your peeps.
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8Mpx != 8MB, JPEG compresses very well, so the typical file will be well below 8MB, more like 2MB (incidentally, 8Mpx without compression requires 24MBytes, 3 bytes per pixel assuming your image is 24bits color).
I have a SLR plus compact for my travels, so my camera phone is pretty much irrelevant, but we're digressing. Anyway, I personally don't use digital zoom on any camera, the ones that have it have the feature disabled as I prefer to crop later on the desktop if I need to.