Why does digital zoom suck?

I'm not a camera guy but my understanding was that lens quality and lens action look up space that phones don't have (or want to dedicate).

So basically your zoom is just scaling up the same sensors (and omitting the surrounding periphery for light detection and adjustment) rather than any mechanical lens zooming.

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>>59091096
Because it's cropping moron - digital zoom will never be better than optical until they find a whole host of new ways to fuck with light and sensor photosite densities, and then it will just be equally good but limited.

When you take a picture you're trying to get as much light in as possible, A combination of wide aperture and large sensor size are what drive the maximum image quality. Digital zoom wastes this by throwing away light captured and information when you could just have an optical zoom or be satisfied with a prime lens and take pictures better.

>>59091096
Digital zoom is literally just scaling an image larger and then cropping it like you would in an image manipulation program like paint or gimp. It's not a real zoom.

At some point I suppose is possible to implement some kind of fractal scaling algorithm into the camera that can reveal synthetic "detail" inferred from neighboring pixels but you would need fairly popular processor in your camera to pull this off, or you'd be sitting there waiting for 10 minutes for it get finished calculating.

>>59091249
*powerful processor

An example of a fractal rescale is that used by waifu2x.

>>59091249
If you get information beyond nyquist it's crap. Aliasing. Such an algorithm would reveal nothing.

The future of sensor design is stuff like Sigma's Foveon, but there's got to be a more clever implementation. Detecting the entire visible spectrum at one photosite is the solution for maximum resolution.

>>59091246
Fair enough, i assumed it was also software enhanced

>>59091096
As stated above, digital zoom is just cropping and resizing a photo, as you would on your computer. The reason it's acceptable for many people is because they aren't going to examine the 3000x4000 image down to the pixel looking for flaws when viewing it on a 1080p screen.

>>59091096
I remember it was an advertisement gimmick, new camera zooms up to 15 times without any protruding optical zoom lens!

>>59091786
This. Digital zoom will get better, but will never be as good as optical.

The Lytro cameras are capable of some pretty crazy stuff, if you're into that sort of thing.

>>59091422
Even if it was being enhanced by software, it's working with less information when you crop.

>>59091264
Except that's trained speciically on solid lines of anime
It doesn't work like that in a photo

>>59092518
It has a photo option.

because you can't just make something out of nothing. jesus christ. You think it works just like on CSI?

The best we have is something like this: https://github.com/alexjc/neural-enhance

which is impressive, but:
"GPU Rendering HQ — Assuming you have CUDA setup and enough on-board RAM to fit the image and neural network, generating 1080p output should complete in 5 seconds, or 2s per image if multiple at the same time.
CPU Rendering HQ — This will take roughly 20 to 60 seconds for 1080p output, however on most machines you can run 4-8 processes simultaneously given enough system RAM. Runtime depends on the neural network size."

That shit ain't working on your smartphone in realtime.