Digital Zoom doesn't focus well

[honger]

So, I went to a baseball game today (Mariners -vs- A's in Seattle) and brought my G1 for its first real "workout".

What I noticed after downloading the pix is that every picture I took with the digital zoom turned out blurry. And I did those using the "Auto" mode, so it supposedly took care of everything for me.

All of the pictures I took without digital zoom on came out sharp. What's going on that I need to know about before using the 2x and 4x zoom?

Also, the picture in the LCD was never clear before shooting (after shooting while looking at the pix, the digital zoom images seemed okay. It was only upon inspection after download that they looked obviously out of focus).

Thanks.

[shaunyc]

The way digital zoom works is by taking either 1/4 or 1/16 of the area of the CCD and blowing the image up to full size. What this means is that digital zoom has the same effect as heavily cropping an image in Photoshop and magnifying the result to a larger size - if you give it a try you'll notice that the images lose their sharpness the more you magnify them.

Occasionally some post-processing can restore some of the sharpness, but the best solution is to avoid the digital zoom feature and see if you can get closer to the subject. At a ball game this might be a problem, so the next best solution might be to consider the optional teleconverter attachment.

Shaun