Help a noob.

[kyrax12]

Higher megapixel means better zooming right?

let say I want to take picture of faraway objects with a Samsung Galaxy SII camera. Would the 8 megapixel camera be good at zooming in and out and still retain quality?

 

[sixone]

The number of pixels has nothing to do with zoom quality. Zoom quality is determined by the lens.

A camera phone will not zoom well, or give you good IQ. You need a camera designed to use a zoom lens.

 

[syee]

If you want to zoom in closer to an object using a camera phone and retain semi decent image quality, get up and walk closer to it. (and no, I'm not trying to be a smartass... )

Digital zoom just works on extrapolation of each pixel so you're going to lose image quality if you use digital zoom. Like sixone says, if you're concerned with image quality, use an actual camera with an actual zoom lens.

If you just want to take a picture of your dinner to post on Facebook, then the phone will probably suffice.

 

[BigSmooth]

Megapixels are unrelated to true zoom capability, and in general should be very far down the list when you are determining the quality of images that will come from a given camera. In fact, too many megapixels on a small sensor can actually degrade image quality.

 

[Madwand1]

Higher megapixel means better zooming right?

let say I want to take picture of faraway objects with a Samsung Galaxy SII camera. Would the 8 megapixel camera be good at zooming in and out and still retain quality?

Yes, this is technically correct -- you can "zoom" more in post-processing, cropping the outside using the remaining pixels, but various trade-offs, including the fact that say 5-8mp is not a big difference when talking about "zoom" and the fact that you'll see more noise and blur when "zooming in" makes the advantage negligible in practice.

 

[TanisHalfElven]

The number of pixels has nothing to do with zoom quality. Zoom quality is determined by the lens.

That is quite incorrect. Megapixels has everything to do with digital zoom quality. However, a cell phone camera lens is probably unable to resolve those 8 MP anyway. So in this particular case, OP it wouldn't matter all that much.

 

[currahee440]

Higher megapixel means better zooming right?

let say I want to take picture of faraway objects with a Samsung Galaxy SII camera. Would the 8 megapixel camera be good at zooming in and out and still retain quality?

Digital Zoom is a software component. It crops the image and blooms it using an algorithmic to an approximated image. In this case, no matter how many MPs a sensor has it still will give a crappy zoom. Just the way it works... and MPs are more of a marketing tactic.

Wiki has a good article on digital zoom. This photo shows a digital zoom vs optical zoom comparison: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Digital_zoom_example.png

 

[TanisHalfElven]

Digital Zoom is a software component. It crops the image and blooms it using an algorithmic to an approximated image. In this case, no matter how many MPs a sensor has it still will give a crappy zoom. Just the way it works... and MPs are more of a marketing tactic.

Wiki has a good article on digital zoom. This photo shows a digital zoom vs optical zoom comparison: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Digital_zoom_example.png

Any idea what lens was used for that. Cuz the 50mm is much much worse than i'd expect.... unless thats not a DSLR.