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No Loss Digital Zoom?

Posted by Northern Flier on October 18, 2012 at 5:28am

Hi Guys



I'm a radio tech that works on land mobile radio, and also have my HAM license.  I've got a bit of experience flying a quad rotor (about 9 hours on it of flight time now) and have played around with fixed wing a bit 5 flights with a friends Typhoon 2, and of course a lot of time on an RC simulator.  I've got a Skywalker 1.68 in the mail, and am setting up a UAV with a camera on a pan-tilt turret on the bottom, kind like the Desert Hawk.



Anyway, I was wondering about zoom-able cameras.  The best route seems to be either a foxtech box camera, or a sony box camera.

http://www .foxtechfpv.com/fh10z-pal10x-optical-zoom-rc-controlled-camworld-smallest-7-p-166.html



However, I was thinking.  Seeing as we're only transmitting like 640x480 max anyway, would it be possible to have an HD camera, and use only an "digital zoom"?  You could zoom in many times without reducing the picture quality lower then 640x480. This would be no moving parts, which is always a plus.



Streaming video out from a view screen of a digital camera might be one way.  Any other thoughts on how to do this?  Somebody must have thought of this and be doing it already?



I'd love to hear your comments,

Barry

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Replies

  • Marooned October 21, 2012 at 3:02pm
    Many years ago Sony introduced something called (IIRC) Smart Zoom. I have old but still kicking butt Sony V1 and in options when Smart Zoom is enabled it works exactly as you described. In max resolution there is no digital zoom and the lower the resolution the bigger the digital zoom. Up to the point where desired resolution meets physical one. So preventing up scaling therefore quality loss and illogical file size. One can do the same in any photo editor by up scaling (if there are some strange reasons for that).
    But like Luke said, the zoom amount is not big.

    And don't listen to those who says "it's impossible" ;-)
  • Stephen R Mann October 19, 2012 at 9:10pm

    What you want is impossible.  Digital Zoom is a consumer gimmick and seriously compromises the image quality.  If you start with 640x480 and do a digital zoom in by 50%, then you are taking the pixels in the center 320x240 in the original image and spread them out to the 640x480 output.  The software in the camera then guesses what the in-between pixels should contain.

    Maybe in a few years when Light Field cameras mature a bit more....

  • Luke Olson October 19, 2012 at 2:43pm

    There really isn't that much resolution to work with, at most you'd get 2.25x zoom (1080/480 = 2.25) which isn't much zoom.

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