What distance for digital photo?

[bowz]

For a camera with 12x or 10x optical zoom, what is about the max distance I can take a picture of a deer and still be a quality photo of the animal?

 

[foulshot]

bowz, I've shot deer at about 30-40yds and got decent shots out of a 10x zoom from an Olympus C-740. Once you bump up the digital zoom, it really degrades the pics. Depending on your camera, you may be able to buy a teleconverter to add some length to your zoom.

 

[Lan-Lord]

my old Sony F707 had 5x optical, 2x digital. using digital on the sony wasn't too bad. I also added a 1.7x olympus telephoto which could give me 17x total (including digital zoom). Some digital zooms are terrible, mine did okay, as long as it was a good photo. If it was bad (eg soft, bad exposure, etc) the digital zoom magnified your error.

this photo was 35 yards, photographed at 17x

this shot was probably 60-70 yards, at 17x on my old sony. some of the edges were cropped out to fill the frame a little more with the animal.. but this image is too soft in my opinion.. good for looking at since it is a great whitetail, but it would not hold up to my standards if printed at 8x10 or larger.

 

[bigbucksk]

I use a Panasonic FZ1 and find that i can get some decent pictures of deer out to around 100 yards(in my opinion anyways). Here are a few examples of pictures taken at different distances. All pictures are taken at full 12x optical zoom with no digital zoom and have been resized from 1600x1200 to 800x600 or smaller.


15 yards:

Full-size and cropped:

40 yards:

Full-size and cropped:

50 yards:

70 yards:

80 yards:

90 yards:

150+ yards:

200+ yards:

500+ yards:

 

[Lan-Lord]

good examples bigbuck. That helps bring it into perspective.
It looks like the first couple shots were in low light.. it performed well in that situation.