Photography with a mobile? This is Buncrana at dusk taken on a Nokia mobile with a 1.3 megapixel camera. A pleasant enough view which looks reasonable on a typical screen. The original JPEG file size was 146kb which is slightly below the average of around 200kb for this model, this is due to the large areas of the same colour, mainly the sky, water and road surface. However, any attempt to modify it in a photo editing programme will tend to be exaggerated, leading to 'weird' hues and effects very quickly. The colours are not particularly true either, with the sky and evening glow being being more gold than the red showing here. Elements within the image are also quite contrasted with distinct areas of one particular shade rather than merging tones.

Buncrana again. This time I used the first stage of the zoom facility and the original file size is down to 30.8kb. Notice how the sand in the foreground is now appearing pixilated and the lampposts slightly indistinct. The camera has not in fact zoomed in at all. What it has done is select a section from the centre of the frame and enlarged it to fit the screen of the mobile phone, thus giving the appearance of zoom.

Oh dear. This is Co Donegal, between Dunglow and Letterkenny.  The camera is on maximum zoom and the file size is a miserable and quite useless  3.15 kb. Not the result you would like to achieve at your friends wedding. Although these pictures are taken on a mobile phone exactly same principles apply to all digital cameras. The lower the pixel count and the more compressed the JPEG then the poorer the result. Digital zoom only magnifies the centre of the image, it does not actually enlarge the subject relative to the sensor as optical zoom does. To produce good quality prints at anything bigger than 6X4 then a JPEG file size of above 2-3 mb is recommended.