If there’s one tip you can benefit from as a digital camera user, it’s to stay away from the digital zoom on your camera, and use the optical zoom instead.
This may seem strange, since the digital zoom multiplies your zooming capabilities by several times what the optical zoom offers, but if quality is important to you, you really shouldn’t rely on digital zoom.
Digital zoom isn’t a true representation of the scene you’re shooting, and will often result in a more cloudy or blurry picture.
With most digital cameras, the megapixel quality is high enough that you can simply zoom in to your optical zoom’s limit, and then crop and “blow up” the picture later. You’ll likely be able to do so without the sacrifice in quality that your pictures would suffer from when using digital zoom!
Take heed to his advice and you’ll take better close-up pictures in no time!