How can I activate the digital-zoom on the D5100?

swissmacswissmac
edited December 2012 Posted in » Nikon D5100 Forum
Hi there,

I would like to know how I can activate the digital-zoom on my D5100. I didn't find any help in the manual. Maybe it's not possible?

Thanks for any assistance.

Cheers

Comments

  • NDFanNDFan
    edited January 2013
    I'm not sure as I just bought mine recently, but I believe you may be able to do it by pressing the + button just to the right of the info screen. The same button you would use to zoom in during playback mode.
  • Nymike619Nymike619
    edited January 2013
    There's no digital zoom for taking pictures on the D5100 unless you are looking at a preview in the LCD screen after the picture is taken.
  • tonytony
    edited January 2013
    I found that you can zoom in before you take the picture, it just won't take it. It will be a normal full size picture. I was wondering the same thing.
  • jackzipper14jackzipper14
    edited December 2014
    Very frustrating to zoom to correct a picture and then find the camera fails to take the shot you hoped for!
  • ohyeaharohyeahar
    edited December 2014
    Fellas, digital zoom = cropping. Just crop as much as you want using whatever photo editor you want on either your PC or smartphone or tablet.
    Pressing the zoom buttons in Live View magnifies the image for easier manual focus; nothing else.
  • TravellerTraveller
    edited February 2015
    True, but on some cameras like my old Sony A330, a degree of interpolation occurs as part of the digital zoom process.
  • brutobruto
    edited February 2015
    Digital zooms sometimes resample to avoid the jagged appearance of aliased edges, but so do many software programs when cropping. Even the freeware Irfanview includes a set of resampling options. I would not count on in-camera algorithms to do any better, and in any case it's hardly a problem unless you're cropping quite deeply.

    Edit to add: just to test, I did a comparison with my little Fuji pocket camera. This is a pretty decent small waterproof camera with both optical and digital zoom, which clearly interpolates digital zoom.

    So I took a picture with optical zoom all the way out and then of the same subject with digital zoom added, both on a little Gorillapod with self timer. I went through a series of crops from matching the two images to a part about 300 pixels wide out of the original 4400. The images remained essentially the same. The program I used (Irfanview) resamples crops. The final images I compared were far and away too small and fuzzy to be worth anything, and both were clearly interpolated with no pixel jaggies. My verdict is that anything approaching a decent post processing program will do as good a job as in-camera digital zoom, and you should not worry one more moment about it.
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