alecstilleyedye said:
make sure that zoom is optical, not digital.
[I'm not talking from a serious photographer's point of view here - I just take snaps for my website]
That used to be a very serious point when camera sensors didn't have enough pixels. In order to digitally zoom in, each pixel had to be magnified and the resulting image was horribly pixellated.
Now that I've got 12 megapixels to play with, however, I find that effectively I have to digitally zoom
out most of the time. I have a 19" widescreen monitor which displays 1440 x 900 pixels, but my camera takes pictures which are 4000 x 3000 pixels so I have to zoom out by nearly a factor of 3 to get images to fit the screen. When not zooming out on this camera, the images are almost equivalent in size to those using 3 times digital zoom on my original 2 megapixel camera, only without the pixellation.
I hadn't anticipated this when I bought the camera. A 12 megapixel resolution is actually OTT, but it has turned out to be really quite handy. Instead of taking pictures using the 3 x optical zoom, I quite often take a wider angle picture and then I can choose which area of the image to 'digitally zoom into' back at home and there is still plenty of resolution to play with.