topic Re: Digital Zoom for still pictures on Canon M50 Mark II in EOS DSLR & Mirrorless Cameras

Digital Zoom for still pictures on Canon M50 Mark II

CrowsEye — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 16:53:29 GMT

I have a Canon M50 Mark II. The camera has digital zoom for movie/video mode, but this feature doesn’t seem to be available for still pictures. Am I missing something? Is digital zoom available to take still pictures on this camera? I know that I can use the live view screen to zoom in on still pictures to help focus, but when the picture is taken it is shot only using the optical zoom on my lens. It seems odd that the Canon M50 II would have digital zoom just for movies. The same technology should allow for the zoom to work on still pictures too, right?
I know that the digital zoom is just cropping the image and that there is a reduction in IQ, but I’d still find it useful in some situations to take still pictures using the digital zoom. And maybe it’s my imagination, but it seems that the digitally zoomed image on the live view screen seems sharper on distance subjects than when I take the actual picture and crop it.

Re: Digital Zoom for still pictures on Canon M50 Mark II

kvbarkley — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 17:04:38 GMT

Movie digital zoom is sort of "built in" since you are using a crop of the sensor anyway.

Re: Digital Zoom for still pictures on Canon M50 Mark II

stevet1 — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 18:53:03 GMT

CrowsEye,

I have a T8i, and it works the same way. Digital zoom is only available in the video mode. No stills.

Steve Thomas

Re: Digital Zoom for still pictures on Canon M50 Mark II

CrowsEye — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 21:33:39 GMT

I can capture frames from video and use them as still pictures, so I suppose that is a workaround, but would be nice to have a digital zoom for stills option that didn’t require that extra step.

Re: Digital Zoom for still pictures on Canon M50 Mark II

krahe — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 18:05:58 GMT

Digital zoom is essentially just an automatic, real-time crop. Instead you can crop after the fact, either in-camera or on a computer later.

Re: Digital Zoom for still pictures on Canon M50 Mark II

johnrmoyer — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 20:01:38 GMT

If you set the camera to save raw plus JPG, then using the free to download Canon DPP software one may scale an image to 200%. If one saves a 16 bit TIFF file from DPP, then one may use Gimp free software to enlarge the image more than 200 per cent. Starting with 16 bits mean there is more information to upscale before saving as an 8 bit JPG from Gimp. Gimp has a newer JPEG compression algorithm than DPP and will produce a smaller file with the same quality.

DPP may also be used to crop the photo.

I suggest doing a second unsharp mask after upscaling.

200 per cent upscale with modern algorithms usually works very well. For more than 200 percent, there will be some blurring of details which were never in the data in the first place.

Even photo editing apps in phones usually do fine at up-scaling, but might not allow specification of unsharp mask parameters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scaling

I often use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanczos_resampling algorithm in GraphicsMagick free software.

https://www.gimp.org/