the best zoom?

[johndrone33]

Wrong

When you shoot with your drone, you get the full resolution.
With the main camera of your Mavic 3 pro, that's 5280×3956.
You could crop in one quarter of the frame and you have a nice sharp 2640×1978 image.

You could use 4× digital zoom get a similar image, but digital zoom stretches the 2640×1978 image 4 times to give you an unsharp 5280×3956 image.
If you were to use 10× or 15× digital zoom, the camera will be blowing up very small parts of the original image, resulting in very soft, unsharp low quality images.
The greater the magnification, the poorer the image quality will be.

This is what I mean about digital zoom being junk.
It gives you crummy, unsharp, poor quality images.
That's fine if that's all you want, but if you assumed that digital zoom would give you similar to what you get with the 1×, 3× or 7× cameras, you'll be very disappointed.

Digital zoom is good for marketing cameras to people who don't know better.
Digital zoom isn't for photographers who want to capture quality images.

So you are telling me the result will be better if i crop the video instead of using the zoom?

I thought the result would be exactly the same since the zoom crops the video if you go over 1,3 or 7 x on the mavic 3 pro.

For example, if you zoom 14x, thats a 100% crop from 7x.

 

[Meta4]

So you are telling me the result will be better if i crop the video instead of using the zoom?

I thought the result would be exactly the same since the zoom crops the video if you go over 1,3 or 7 x on the mavic 3 pro.

For example, if you zoom 14x, thats a 100% crop from 7x.

Cropping is one thing.
Cropping and then stretching the cropped image to the original image dimensions is something else.
The result you get is junk.

 

[BossBob]

If you are going to crop a still image from a drone be aware that the .jpegs are quite heavily processed which gives them an artificial, almost “painted” look. You’d be better off taking a look at and processing .dng files as you’ll have all the data from the sensor to work with.

 

[johndrone33]

Cropping is one thing.
Cropping and then stretching the cropped image to the original image dimensions is something else.
The result you get is junk.

okay.
I dont really understand why it would strecth the image when its allready cropped

 

[BossBob]

An explanation from Wikipedia…..
Digital zoom is a method of decreasing the precise angle of view of a digital photograph or video image. It is accomplished by cropping an image down to an area with the same aspect ratio as the original, and scaling the image up to the dimensions of the original. The camera's optics are not adjusted. It is accomplished electronically, so no optical resolution is gained. Digital zooming may be enhanced by computationally expensive algorithms which sometimes involves artificial intelligence. In cameras that perform lossy compression, digital zoom is preferred to enlargement in post-processing, as the zooming may be applied before detail is lost to compression Continued in Wikipedia

 

[Droning on and on...]

I was able to take real closeup images and videos of Herons nesting with their baby chicks in several nests on top of 100' high trees behind our home. I primarily hovered the drone at around 200'-300' and zoomed in for very clear images. No herons or their babies were alarmed or concerned with the drone since it was a decent height away from their nests. I used my Mavic 4 Pro.

That would be 100-200', or ~33-66m, away, which is well beyond the 20m limit @MS Coast cited, so sounds good

 

[Droning on and on...]

okay.
I dont really understand why it would strecth the image when its allready cropped

Depends on the desired final format.

Easier to understand with video... "Digital zoom", simply called zoom on most video cameras, must maintain a selected output format frame-to-frame. So, when "zooming" while shooting video, if there isn't an optical lens array, will consist of cropping the sensor output, then upscaling the smaller pixel dimensions back to the output format. At 4k, for example, a "2x zoom"* will take the center quarter of the sensor, 1920x1080, then upscale back to 3840x2160. There is no increase in resolution, however. There is still only 1920x1080 discrete pixels of information.

For photographs, this becomes an issue mostly with prints, or fixed-sized display output. If you're format is 5"x7", then cropping and printing result in the same upscaling... Taking a full-resolution image (12288x8192 using maximum supported 100MP resolution on the Mavic 4 Pro) would undergo the same process, "zooming" 2x by cropping a 6244x4096 portion of the image, than scaling it back up to 12288x8192 to produce the same size print as the original.

Of course, this is simplified, as there are other factors to consider, like the resolution of the printer, and more. It illustrates what "digital zoom" means in real application by the general public.

*Note: Could be 4x zoom, I can't ever remember if the colloquial factor is one of the linear dimensions, or the ratio of the number of pixels