I hated a lot of things about my Mavica FD-71, but one thing I always loved was the 10x zoom. Digital cameras with greater than 4x zoom are few and far between, and all of them have flaws that I just couldn't bring myself to live with. In settling on the S50, one of my main rationalizations was that it was still capable of producing the same images the Mavica could - I could crop to 640x480, and get a similar zoom level. I put this page together to verify that - and I was surprised to see that my rough calculations were almost exactly accurate. These photos aren't meant to contrast the image quality of the two cameras.
The following sets of photos compare a 640x480 crop from the center of the S50 shot at maximum zoom to the full frame of the Mavica at maximum zoom. I was amazed at how close the two are. The S50 shot is linked to the full-size image.
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These sets compare the wide angle shots - again, nearly identical coverage. This isn't as interesting, except to note that the Mavica is nominally 40mm, not 35mm equivalent at wide angle.
| S50 | Mavica |
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Again, not very interesting - here, I compare the 640x480 crop of the S50 at wide angle to the full frame of the Mavica.
| S50 | Mavica |
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