Zoomed Owls

I’ve been taking quite a few pictures of the Great Horned Owl nest behind our home, but I can only do that because of the camera I own. As a comparison today, I took photos with my iPhone 7 Plus, my older high zoom Sony DSC-HX400V, and my current high zoom Nikon Coolpix P900. With each camera I took an unzoomed photo and a fully zoomed one – and I also cropped as close as possible to the nest for a closest view …

The iPhone was a 2x zoom lens, and “digital zoom” that claims as much as 10x – the horrible results are a strong indication to NEVER use that feature:

The Sony has a 60x zoom lens and takes very good photos; it’s also a lot lighter than the Nikon:

The Nikon has the highest zoom at 83x and is the camera I bought for and took to Africa for our safari last year – but at the highest zoom levels it’s hard to use without a tripod. Nevertheless if you need maximum zoom, it’s a great performer for the price! The fully cropped image still has resolution more than the normal 1500x that I use for web photos (as you see if you view the full size image):

From this comparison, it’s clear that iPhone is still useless for high zoom images, but that the Sony is generally just as good as the Nikon; if you can find the Sony, it’s a great buy!