Ultra-Zoom Digital Camera Review

About long-zoom cameras

While most compact digital cameras have 3x to 10x zoom lenses, ultra-zoom or extended-zoom digital cameras offer a much longer optical zoom, typically 12x to 20x, for taking close-up shots of faraway subjects. Some mega-zoom cameras come with 35x optical zooms.

This report covers ultra-zoom cameras with 12x zoom or greater. If you prefer a camera that's more lightweight and compact, our reports on digital cameras and cheap digital cameras include models with 3x to 10x zoom lenses. A digital SLR (single lens reflex) camera offers more flexibility. These can accept accessory zoom lenses, but they cost a lot more and have more of a learning curve.

Photography sites offer the most exhaustive testing and credible reviews, although some sites are better organized -- and easier for a layperson to understand -- than others. Testers at Imaging-Resource.com, DPReview.com, PhotographyBlog.com, DCResource.com, DigitalCameraInfo.com, Steves-Digicams.com and DigitalCamera-HQ.com dive deeply into performance issues, like shutter and shooting speeds, because ultra-zooms tend to be slower than regular digital cameras and DSLR cameras. They also judge features like image stabilization, which makes it easier to shoot long-zoom photos that aren't shaky.

Consumer electronics sites like CNET and PC World also evaluate digital cameras. The reviews are shorter, but they still test key performance features. Popular consumer-advocate publications such as ConsumerReports.org, Choice magazine, Which? magazine and TrustedReviews.com have large-scale digital camera reports. These sources test cameras and rank them from best to worst in easy-to-read charts. They also publish individual write-ups on the various cameras they test, although ConsumerReports.org's provide very little detail. We also double-check reviews written by real-life camera users at CNET and Amazon.com -- owners sometimes detect problems that the experts miss.