Window cleaners in Niagara Falls - 4

And this is the same picture as the previous one, cropped to 640*480. This results in an effective zoom of 12 * 3.6 or a staggering 43.2x optical zoom in comparison to the little camcorder. That means that the Panasonic has an effective optical zoom that is about double that of the Canon camcorder. Needless to say that I will no longer use the camcorder to obtain a high zoom factor. That said, I would actually have preferred a 24x optical zoom in combination with a 2 megapixel image. It would have been more practical for the type of pictures I want to make. The calculation is, of course, somewhat of an overly optimistic view, given the fact that the pictures are stored in jpeg-format, but I consider that unimportant, also given the nature of the pictures I want to obtain.

I normally make it a point never to publish pictures on the web that are larger than 320*240. For all intents and purposes, that would actually mean an effective zoom capacity of 86.4x. That is more theoretical than practical, however, since I nearly never enlarge, crop, and the like: too much trouble ^_^.