Huawei P30 Pro - Video Recording Zoom problem! 0,7-1,5 = super clear 5,0 - 8,0 = super clear but 1,5 - 5,0 = rather blurry while video recording? Why?

[Anonymous]

[MrOracle]

It's because you are using digital zoom, which is really just cropping the image and resulting in fewer pixels the more you zoom in. Smartphones don't have OPTICAL zoom, which is when you have moving lenses that bend the light - a few phones have a second camera with a 2x lens, but that's not the same thing - so if you want to zoom in or out and maintain quality, YOU (the holder of the phone) have to use your feet to do the zooming.

Sony HD broadcast camera

Zoom lenses are long and they're expensive and fragile, all things that make them unsuitable for putting on phones. If you look at this broadcast camera that costs about $300,000, that big box on the front is the zoom lens, and this component of the camera costs $225,000 - the camera body itself is only about $12,000, with the tripod head and external controls making up the rest of the cost. The vast majority of the cost is that zoom lens, because it has a massive zoom range (5,200X zoom) and has very fine motorized control that can also zoom very quickly if need be. But because that lens is doing all of the work, you get a full-quality picture at any zoom setting.

Digital zoom simply crops out a portion of the picture and increases the size of those pixels to fill the screen, and the more you zoom in, the fewer pixels there are and the less detail you can see.

[Asker]

So in other words there's no way I can fix my 1,5 - 4,9 zoom?

[MrOracle]

What you CAN do is buy some clip-on telephoto lenses, and when you need a closer-up shot on something far away and you can't physically move closer, you pop on one of the lenses and now you have a much closer shot. There are both wide-angle and telephoto lenses, and even zoom lenses. Of course, you have to carry them around with you, but they will vastly increase photo quality compared to digital zoom.