Friday, June 24, 2011

Zoom Minus Zero, No Limit

Marketers love to boil the nuance away, and reduce a product’s specifications to a single number, which they can then use as a proxy for “quality.” See megapixels, megahertz, and watts.

In compact cameras, the zoom ratio reduces two useful numbers to a single dubious number. It is the ratio of the lens’s longest focal length to the shortest focal length. For example, a 28–280 mm lens has a 10x zoom ratio.

So what the hell is a “0x” zoom, as shown in this Best Buy circular?

0xZoom(Click to, um, zoom)

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