I hate it when companies do stuff like this: Sanyo announced two new cameras today, the Xacti DSC-S3 and DSC-S4, with 3.2- and 4-megapixel CCDs, respectively, but the S3 has a 3x optical zoom, while the S4 has a 2.8x. It’s totally not a big deal, but it’s just confusing to consumers (and dumb tech writers). I’m sure it just has to do with the different sensors, and most of the other specs of the cameras are low/high like you’d expect. Imaging Resource has the breakdown.
Read [ImagingResource via DPB]
Update: Reader Phil Gross explains what I was too dumb to after the jump:
The effictive zoom of a camera comes from both the optics and the size of
the image target (film negative, CCD, whatever). Smaller detector equals
larger effective zoom (it’s really just a crop of the middle of the picture,
see http://www.marius.org/fom-serve/cache/53.html ). The Sanyo situation
seems to be that the two cameras are identical, including optics, but the
4MP detector is a bit bigger than the 3.2, so has less effective zoom (i.e.
is capturing more of the image the lens projects). Put another way, the 4MP
version will still capture more of the scene with its 2.8x “zoom” than the
3.2 will with its 3x. If the lower number bothers you, crop out the edges
of the pictures with Photoshop, and imagine that you’ve got extra telephoto.
