Question about digital cameras

Someone help me here. If I am far away from something that is moving, what combination of optical and digital zooms on a digital camera is best so I can get clear pictures. Also if anyone has any suggestions about cameras that will take clear pictures from afar I would appreciate it. Sitting in stands taking pictures of marching bands only to come home to a memory chip full of blurry pictures is frustrating

 

Digital Zoom always sucks, turn it off, leave it off.
Optical Zoom - you need a camera that has whatever zoom you need, or support for external zoom lenses, to get the shot you want...

The problem with blurry shots is three-fold: camera isn't using the correct ISO settings (set manually to correct if possible), your hands are shaky (might need to buy image stabilizer or a tripod), and you have digital zooming turned on (turn it off).

My camera has automatic settings for outdoor sporting events to help with that first one.

 

yeah, digital zoom = scaling up the image after the fact, so yeah, turn it off. you can always scale it up later after you get it on the computer.

i had a lot of fuzzy pics of my kid cuz i didn't want to use flash on him (i generally don't like flash cuz it looks really washed out). i finally set the iso setting to 400 (the highest) and photos without flash look fine and not blurry.


if you're talking about long distance shooting, you need either lots of pixels or a good zoom lens. the standard is generally like 3x for the point and shoot types. if you want to stick with that kind of camera, then you need to up the pixel resolution. option b is going with a digital slr type, tho i suppose there are slr "looking" cameras that might have better zoom abilities.

what are you currently using?

 

Canon S45

 

depending on the light, you should set adjust your iso settings. turn off the digital zoom, set the iso to 400 (your flash isn't going to reach anything at a distance). 400 might look a bit grainy, tho. you can try other iso settings and see how they turn out by zooming in on your pics while at the event. a 2" screen isn't going to tell you much about how sharp a 4mpixel image really is.

keep in mind that turning off the digital zoom will effectively reduce your zoom level from being about 11x to being only 3x -- so how "close" you can zoom in will feel a lot different. accept it knowing that your image is actually better off.

the iso stuff will relate more to motion blur (streakiness from either subject motion or from your camera moving as you take the picture). the zoom stuff will effect more of the overall quality of the image. figure that a 3.6 digital zoom is basically inventing 12 new pixels for every single sampled pixel. no way to do that without adding blur.