Does digital zoom affect exposure metering, or is it just like cropping later?
Asked 4/25/2018
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I understand that digital zoom is essentially an in-camera crop compared with cropping after capture. What I want to know is specifically about exposure metering: when digital zoom is enabled, do cameras typically meter using only the zoomed/cropped area shown on screen, or do they still meter from the full sensor/frame? I know this may vary by camera and metering mode, but is there any common behavior or tendency?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
8y ago
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This would be easy to test: simply stand in a dark room on a sunny day and point your camera at a bright window. Does the exposure change as you zoom in to only include the window in the frame?
I don't have a camera with this feature to test, except my Android phone — and that definitely makes its decisions based on the displayed image. I found this in the manual for a Nikon Coolpix, though:
Depending on how we interpret that, this camera either a) just uses the visible portion, or b) attempts to replicate that as closely as possible by using metering modes which are biased towards the center of the image, even if that doesn't precisely match the zoom. (The text sounds most like "b", but... who knows how the communication from engineering to technical writers went.)
Originally by user1943. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user1943
8y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Digital zoom itself does not change the light reaching the sensor, so it does not inherently require a different exposure the way optical zoom can. In that sense, it is still just a crop.
However, a camera may change its metering decision based on the digitally zoomed view. Community testing showed at least one compact camera (Canon IXUS 160, center-weighted metering) chose a darker exposure when digital zoom excluded a large dark area from the displayed frame. A phone was also observed to meter from the displayed image. Nikon documentation cited in one answer suggests some cameras may bias metering toward the visible/central area, though that may depend on implementation.
So the practical answer is: digital zoom is still a crop, but exposure metering may or may not be based mainly on the cropped view depending on the camera and metering mode. Spot or center-weighted modes are more likely to be affected than fully evaluative patterns.
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