How to increase zoom power for sony dcr sr82?

Question

I just bought the sony dcr sr82......this is my first time owning a camcorder so I dont have anything to compare and contrast it to...but just going by what I have here, I was wondering if this is as good as it gets?

the camcorder has a zoom setting where I can set it up to 2000x...so I took the camcorder outside for a test..I started to zoom in ..and well it does do some zooming but at about 3/4 of the way in things started getting extremely blurry...

and I thought, is this the way its supposed to be? What would be the purpose of allowing the camcorder to zoom that much in while the whole thing becomes so blurry? So I was just wondering if theres something else I could do to make it better? I set the focus all the way up to infinity so..at maximum, zooming in still gets blurry at 3/4 of the way...

Answer 1

"What would be the purpose of allowing the camcorder to zoom that much in while the whole thing becomes so blurry?"

It allows the manufacturers to put a large number in a box on a comparison chart - nothing more!   As Damocles said, stick with the optical zoom - 25x is plenty.

Answer 2

There is "optical" zoom and there is "digital" zoom.  Optical zoom is the lens actually zooming.  Digital zoom is the camera taking a guess at what the picture would look like if you could zoom further.  I don't know why they even bother to put digital zoom on cameras - it almost universally looks horrible and blurry like you describe.  The more you digitially zoom, the more guesswork it has to do, the worse it looks.

What you can do to increase your zoom is to buy and add on lens.  Typically these lenses are like 52mm, so you may need to buy an adaptor (for my Sony MVC-CD500 I had to get a 46mm to 52mm adaptor).  Unfortunately these don't zoom a lot, like 2X (maybe the ones they make today are better), but 2X is better than nothing.  You can also buy wide angle lenses (less zoom, mine is 0.48X), 'fish eye' lenses, etc.

My advice would be to stick to optical zoom.  You might even want to (if you can) disable digital zoom altogether, so that you don't accidentially select it.