One is an optical zoom that relies on the lens for it’s magnification, and the other is the digital zoom that enlarges the image already captured by digital means instead. The optical zoom is far more preferable than the digital zoom as it will produce sharp and clear zoom shots throughout it’s entire focal range. The digital zoom is only magnifying the resulting image and so it can produce less sharp, grainy pictures instead when used at the higher end of the focal range. So try to get a camera that has as much of the zoom range that you want being handled by the optical rather than the digital zoom.
If having the best image quality is important to you then you want to look for digital cameras that save their files in TIFF, GIF and RAW formats as these do not sacrifice any image quality when compressing the image file for storage. On the other hand, the JPEG image format that many cameras use will cause some loss of image quality in the file compression part of saving the image file.
When deciding what digital camera to buy, much of your decision will revolve around how you plan to use the camera and the resultant image files, and what features are most important to you and the way you shoot your photos.
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