I don't get the concept of digital zoom... you'd be better just cropping the image, or moving closer, rather than degrading the quality.
Apple has implemented somehing like Nokia in the PureView 808 two years ago. That is, up to a point (1.4545x zoom factor with Full HD, 2.1x with 720p etc.), you can
losslessly zoom.
Again, this does NOT seem work in the current stock Camera app in either iOS7 b1 or b2 on the iPhone 5. The original, linked article seems to be flawed.
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Hooray! I was considering getting a new HD video camera. But if the iPhone can now zoom, I'm a happy puppy! 2x-3x isn't much, but it should do fine for my needs.
Note that, in Full HD mode, 1.4545x zoom is the max you can zoom up to losslessly.
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You do realize this is zooming for video not stills. You should be able to zoom an 8MP sensor image 2-3 times without any loss of quality at 1080p.
Unfortunately, it's 1.4545x only in Full HD. Nevertheless, it worked just fine in my tests - see my above-linked report.
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This isn't digital zoom. A full1080P HD image is only 2 mega pixels. for the wide shot it uses the full 8 megapixel sensor and downscales as you zoom in it uses less of the sensor but still more than 2MP. the furthest zoom I imagine will be the central 2 MP of the sensor. If you zoomed in after that you would lose quality.
Exactly.
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It's there and working (albeit not at the best quality). See
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1602171/ for a complete report.
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The sensor on the iPhone 5 is 3264 pixels wide. That's 1.7 times the width of the 1920 pixels of its maximum video resolution. That means you could reasonably zoom on 2x without losing any measurable detail (when compressed to the level of H.264 it compresses - if you could get raw video out, then 1.7x is about it.)
In theory, 1.7; in practice, 1.4545 - see my article for more info if interested.
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However a word of caution.
Any good HD video camera will 'zoom' to a point with an optical lens, preserving image quality. iOS devices rely on digital zooming which although may increase zoom 2x/3x, will also degrade your image quality proportionally.
When you only zoom up to the upsampling limit, no quality degradation will take place. See the Nokia PureView 808.
