Explained: Focal Length Vs ZOOM?

Explained! Focal Length Vs Zoom?

Focal length and zoom are they basically the same thing nope not really. I’ll be explaining the difference between focal length and zoom now people are often confused by these two terms especially those who are just starting out in photography. You'll often get phrases like this lens zooms very far this lens has a lot of zooms.

So let’s start off with focal length now the simple explanation for focal length is the distance between the front element of your lens to the sensor of your camera so the longer your focal length the longer the reach of your lens basically you'll get a tighter image so if the lens has a very long focal length like 200 millimeters then it's referred to as a telephoto lens and if a lens has a very short focal length say 10 millimeters then it's a wide-angle lens because it has a very wide angle of view now a zoom is really just referring to lenses ability to change its focal length like this lens right here it can zoom from 24 millimeters to 805 millimeters lenses that have a fixed focal length are called prime lenses and they cannot zoom so if you were to say something like a 600 millimeter prime lens can zoom very far then that statement is technically incorrect because technically a 600 millimeter lens cannot zoom the correct way to phrase it would be to say that the lens has a very far reach.

Now another thing to understand is the zoom factor now you’ll see the zoom factor being used very often particularly. When it comes to marketing material directed at the mass market i.e. point-and-shoot cameras you’ll see them saying that this camera has a 5-time zoom this camera has a 10 times zoom this camera has a 50 times zoom the zoom factor is simply a numerous get from dividing the longest focal length on a zoom lens by its shortest focal length so, for example, this is a 24 to 105 millimeter zoom lens so if Divide 105 millimeters by 24 millimeters.

I'll get a zoom factor of four point three seven five times now, zoom factors are less commonly used in the high-end markets you still see them from time to time but not as often because of the working professionals zoom factors don’t really mean much they're more interested in knowing the actual range of the focal lengths so that's it for my explanation on focal length versus zoom.